Review: Carolyn Oliver
On Inside the Storm I Want To Touch the Tremble by Carolyn Oliver
by Tyler Truman Julian
Carolyn Oliver’s Inside the Storm I Want To Touch the Tremble is a skillfully crafted debut, powerfully rendered with the talent of a poet sure of her craft and steady in her ambition. The collection moves easily through time and subject; the speaker engages, one moment, with her son, discussing koala bears, the next, tracks Eve and various saints as they interact with different artists and the speaker herself. Oliver does this effectively, maintaining a sure command of both the collection’s narrative, arc, and poetic structures. Across narrative, prose, lyric, and occasional aubade, epithalamion, and structurally experimental genres, Oliver builds a cohesive, interesting, and moving collection that in less capable hands would feel disjointed.
Inside the Storm I Want To Touch the Tremble is ambitious, yet finds ground in the real world. The saints, the art, the academic moments throughout the collection are all rooted in human moments that connect to themes of nostalgia, childrearing and family relationships, and liberation. Oliver begins the collection with a poem about her son and a larger question of ecological, social, and personal survival. The poem, “My Son Asks if I Would Rather Live in a House Infested by Bees or a House Infested by Koalas,” is predicated on a realistic, childish question, climbs to a crescendo that connect the three themes above, introducing them to the reader. She writes,
So, my son’s question. Survival means
koalas on the stairs, lamps turned boughs,
menthol in the mouth. Means marked territories
and the slow click of claws in the dark, days
safe in a house full of sleep. But sometimes—
it feels right to tell you this—sometimes
inside the storm I want to touch the tremble
of a colony warming its queen. I want
walls seeping honey. I want a willing tongue.
So much rests on the you of the poem’s eighteenth line. There’s the personal address to the son and the address to the reader. Here, we begin to learn the collection’s crucial conflict between the speaker’s desire for liberation and the need to care for others, a conflict that returns often throughout the collection. It’s a complicated conflict, and Oliver offers many entry points to help the reader come to understand. Eve reflects on the freedom of her fall, St. Ursula encourages Emily Dickinson toward individualism, John Donne takes comfort from Leonard Cohen as the world ends, and in “Ohio, the late 90s” the speaker observes a classmate, wise beyond her years, and explains how complicated it is to look at another with admiration. Of the classmate, the speaker tells us,
Behind the girl, a dark hedge, a melon-curve of sky ripe for summer.
This is twenty years ago.
She has her own baby girl now, real sick, and the insurance company
won’t approve her medicine.
(“Skin”)
This example emphasizes the-care-of-others-versus-care-of-self-conflict because the speaker is mesmerized by the knowledge this eighth grade girl has and craves her freedom and maturity in the early lines of the poem, but by these last four lines, Oliver’s speaker emphasizes how time has leveled the playing field and the freedom the preteen had twenty years ago has now been absorbed by caring for another. Clearly, this is not a black and white conflict, but memory and family relationships can rarely be delineated into black and white. There’s something lost when either choice is made, to love another or to love yourself. Nowhere in the collection is this more poignant and pointed than in “Listening to Ralph Vaughn Williams on a Tuesday Night,” an elegy to a lover:
Tonight I close a book, note
the oval smudge on its edge. You held
your books this way, index finger braced
against the spine’s opposite—the sternum?
Your fingerprint in pencil means
you were writing the day you turned these pages
though the margins are First Communion white,
a record of that pristine attention
you offered other poets,
you gave it again and again
as if rehearsing a longer silence.
Opening the book once more I find
the inscription I missed, and then
your spiky initials inside the back cover.
Your letters look always like they want a life
off the page, the y in my name diving
twice as deep as the word,
and how is it you will never write
the poem that’s waiting
about gasping letters getting the bends?
Appearing approximately halfway through the collection, this poem only adds to the overall cohesion of it, emphasizing the problem of losing oneself in memory and the opportunity to recreate oneself after loss. The final pages of the collection capitalize on this desire. Oliver’s speaker revisits images and ideas from earlier to create a sense of resolution and completion for the reader. In “Midlife,” the speaker looks forward, declaring,
And on this soft morning
nine years from now,
the days behind gone hollow,
the days ahead milling,
buzzing in their thousands,
waiting for you and
watching the bees drunk
on the stranger’s gift,
I could answer: yes.
This is the time, the place
to end, and start once more.
Let me be born again,
here with the laboring bees
in the last throes of their valiance.
Inside the Storm I Want To Touch the Tremble is a masterful work. It pulls together disparate themes, characters, genres, and structures to build a debut that feels like the work of a poet who has honed her craft and written many books over many years. Oliver’s debut reminds us that complex poetics can be accessible. This collection should find its way onto reader’s shelves regardless of their level of formal poetic knowledge. Carolyn Oliver is a poet I will watch out for years to come.