Unfinished Building - Softcover

Olson, Toby

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566890098 ISBN 13: 9781566890090

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 1993

Synopsis

"Many of these powerfully pirouetting, lyrical narratives are long and lean and muscled with conundrums. Olson's poetry becomes jazz as he performs myriad variations on a theme."--Booklist

About this title

From Library Journal:

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
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review:

Alvina
American Scat
Another Popular Song
Clouds
Come Here
El Monte
Faces
Floobie
Gulls
Here's That Rainy Day
Moot
Patterns
Rose Poem
Shining Hour
Some Small Movements
Standard-13, I Remember Clifford (from Dick Miller)
Standard-9, Just One (some) Of Those Things
Tide Trail
Unfinished Building
-- Table of Poems from Poem FinderŪ

About this edition

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 1566890098
• ISBN 13: 9781566890090
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96