by Lisa Olstein
Copper Canyon Press 2006
Reviewed by Justin Taylor

The Horse Whisperer

Rural, but not pastoral, earthy but not rough-hewn, Lisa Olstein’s Radio Crackling, Radio Gone is a quietly inviting debut. The title is perfectly emblematic of Olstein’s stoic, declarative style (“across makeshift desks, we sit on a makeshift floor; / we prepare for almost nothing that might happen”), though a burst of radio static in so hushed a world as hers might be enough to bring the planes down out of the skies. At the very least it would spook the horses, animals which figure prominently in the poet’s imaginary, as well—apparently—as in her everyday life. The horse makes a suitable metaphor for this strong, graceful collection. Sometimes nervous, often restrained, occasionally playful, the energy that pulses in the veins of these poems is always palpable, like the heart’s beat when the breath is held.

Each section of the book bears a Sappho fragment for its epigraph. Olstein relies on Anne Carson’s translations (from If Not, Winter). The double affinity makes sense in light of Radio’s deep longings, subtle humor, and earnest theological engagement. And yet Olstein’s work is not fragmentary. Each poem stands on its own, total and whole: an intricate, delicate little world.

The poems reward re-reading. The most startling images take time to distinguish themselves against a set—horses, fields, flowers and other foliage, birds, and airplanes—that recur so frequently they begin to feel quotidian. This is not to say they are trite, only to warn the reader that as one becomes regularized to their presence, one may be tempted to breeze past them or read them uncarefully, which is to risk missing some of the book’s most profound moments, such as the final stanza of “Steady Now”:

Butterflies, too, pass us on their long relays to and from.
Once in an ice storm not meant for May,
we watched hundreds freeze on night branches.
In the morning they drifted like embers,
bright fragments collecting around the horses’ mouths
whenever they dipped their heads to the ground.

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