Geoffrey Olsen, Nerves Between Song

 

the fur is dream andgelatinous
I can’t speak or presentcan’t speak
life within mouth ofleaves
dream mouth

arrayed around the bleakopening
I do not have ownershipover blade and all the
things of a blade on theedge of
climactic or feral

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

unordered, unwindowed (“THEDEER HAVENS”)

Followinga 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 DEERHAVENS” (which appeared previously as an above/ground press chapbook), “nervesbetween song,” “LUSH INTERFERENCE,” “THE RADIANT MOSS” and “ CONGLOMERATE .”Nerves Between Song offers a quintet of poem structures that collage andaccumulate, articulating a poetics of voice and ecological concerns, animalsand language, gesture and cascade, fragment and lyric sweep. “to smell thelight // the plural of animals / the other worlds ended / with this one,” hewrites, to close the poem “THERE ARE SACRED CONTOURS AND FRAGMENTS,” aspart of the opening section.

Hislyrics twist, twirl, accumulate and experiment with form. Across fivepoem-sections, lines and fragments overlap, bleed, accumulate; he writes a kindof field notes for witness, attending both landscape and wildlife. “I could bedoing dialogues for our / experience recessed shadow,” he writes, as part of thepoem “THERE TRANSLUCENCE,” set in the fourth section, “felt declension / lightshakes in the liquid [.]” There’s an ongoingness to Olsen’s lyrics, one thatprovides 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 BrandonShimoda

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