Vision of a Storm Cloud [Hardcover]

William Olsen (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 82 pages
• Publisher: Triquarterly; 1 edition (May 6, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810150433
• ISBN-13: 978-0810150430
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,228,158 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How William Olsen Is Breaking New Ground in Poetry, May 17, 2000

By 

Kevin Clark (San Luis Obispo, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Vision of a Storm Cloud (Paperback)

If you like brainy books and rock-and-roll, if you like The New Republic and Salon.com, if you like both Wallace Stevens and Allen Ginsberg, then William Olsen's poetry may be for you. As I've said in print (see SOLO 3, "Velocity and the Visceral in the Poems of William Olsen"), his work is remarkable for its intuition, speed, and breadth of learning.

VISIONS OF A STORM CLOUD is a groundbreaking book of poetry for a variety of reasons. Virtually all of the poems move fast while smartly referring to a panoply of American landmarks, archetypes, and threats. Olsens' subject is the inquiring, educated self in a cultural chaos that keeps portending death. His voice is that of man caught in a jet stream of potential violence he can't control. Wired by a world amped on mortal fear, he chooses to join the quick current and to take succor from it. The electricity is nearly medicinal. The speed of Olsen's voice briefly inoculates him against the twin fears of meaninglessness and mortality.

In a way, Olsen's fascinating poems are a modernist answer to the post-modern developments of John Ashbery or the more radically post-modern Language Poets. Neither of these modes will do for Olsen because they lack the visceral kick that comes with an engaged life. He recognizes all the recent existential concerns about meaning and the inadequacy of language, but he can't stomach the disassociated sensibility. So he practices a poetry of celerity.

I think Olsen is at the forefront of a new kind of poetry that privileges speed, intellect, and emotion. This isn't a book for those looking for either sweetness or elegy. By referencing near the speed of thought, his poems can carry the reader on an astonishing, phantasmagorical ride. While a few other poets have started down a similar trail recently, they aren't likewise driven by the sound of their own informed doubt. Olsen has transformed his interior debate between skepticism and hope into a series of adrenalinic adventures in which the immediate prevails.

A superb book. I return to it often, and I learn from it.

-Kevin Clark