Geoffrey Olsen, Nerves Between Song

 

the fur is dream and gelatinous
I can’t speak or present can’t speak
life within mouth of leaves
dream mouth

arrayed around the bleak opening
I do not have ownership over blade and all the
things of a blade on the edge of
climactic or feral

and the edge reproducing the dream in
a now of disaster songs
after songs and I’m also
the cat and the imbued indirect
that waits, waiting

unordered, unwindowed (“THE DEER HAVENS”)

Following a pair of chapbooks produced so far is the full-length debut by Brooklyn poet Geoffrey Olsen, his Nerves Between Song (Brooklyn NY: Beautiful Days Press, 2024), a collection set as a suite of five sections of poem-clusters: “THE DEER HAVENS” (which appeared previously as an above/ground press chapbook), “nerves between song,” “LUSH INTERFERENCE,” “THE RADIANT MOSS” and “CONGLOMERATE.” Nerves Between Song offers a quintet of poem structures that collage and accumulate, articulating a poetics of voice and ecological concerns, animals and language, gesture and cascade, fragment and lyric sweep. “to smell the light // the plural of animals / the other worlds ended / with this one,” he writes, to close the poem “THERE ARE SACRED CONTOURS AND FRAGMENTS,” as part of the opening section.

His lyrics twist, twirl, accumulate and experiment with form. Across five poem-sections, lines and fragments overlap, bleed, accumulate; he writes a kind of field notes for witness, attending both landscape and wildlife. “I could be doing dialogues for our / experience recessed shadow,” he writes, as part of the poem “THERE TRANSLUCENCE,” set in the fourth section, “felt declension / light shakes in the liquid [.]” There’s an ongoingness to Olsen’s lyrics, one that provides less of a sense of individual poems or poem-fragments, but a larger, full-length structure of ebbs and flows, gesture and nuance. This collection, this book-length poem, is a complex, lovely thing.

for Brandon Shimoda

heat. little circular. embrace ash. voice entangles
shadow prison. little figure stretch against land-
scape. that stolen. that invaded. that incarcerated.
wood surface. sweats alone. built. the noise is piano
dissolves piano. current, what is gray eye? cat length
sinuous wrap self with tile. curling inward. heat clips
sentence. want of meaningful. the reserve is heat. a
leather patch. it dissolves bit by bit. fading shade.
evaporation. we lick each other, the rock for rock salt.
permission for ecstasy. impossibly weighs. a continu-
ous turning down. “what’s the word for this ongoing?”