Unfinished Building

Toby Olson considers poetry no less than good talk about important things. With imagery as accessible as the most ordinary of birds and the commonest weather, he performs an alchemy of language. Unfinished Building shows us it is the details that make up a life, that hold the clues to meaning.

A creative writing teacher (Temple Univ.), poet, and novelist, Olson gathers "all living things in chaos" in his capacious, narrow-lined poems. Before one is aware of it, a conversational, witty poem, nuanced with the mundane, becomes a meditation on life's deeper needs, the difficulty of finding a "sense of direction," the pain of "warped" love and "animal darkness," and the grim, distorted "waves" of memories merging with associations so transparent they "burn the tissues." Half-allusive renditions of human consciousness, these poems, sometimes inquisitive, sometimes overburdened, pursue "crossed and broken patterns" among shifting appearances--"a crazy cycle we can't read/ although we apprehend/ configuration of its form." As on a fever chart of complex disturbances of daily life, the needle of Olson's poetry traces "small and subtle shifts of meaning" and documents "losses and traps" in "the quiet/ certain nature of our love, our lives." For most collections.
- Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., Institute
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