I couldn't describe [Toby Olson] nor do I know his age, even so he seems almost a brother, so moved am I this April morning reading and rereading The Florence Poems.

So what does one do? Praise, point out, explain? Jerome Rothenberg prefaces the poems saying they respond to "the death by sickness that a friend must live through." Festina lente, make haste slowly, a woman is dying. The urgency of address is part of the book's occasion, yet with courage and great honesty. Olson lets himself linger over moments like this:

       And down the sandy path from the parking lot
       a tall young woman in a large red hat
       maneuvers a wheel chair
             containing a thin old man
       in a blue swimming suit
       & comes to the water's edge

One after another, such details enter the penumbra of Florence's dying almost as soon as her poet elegantly and carefully records them. The gravity of this illness, cancer, both personal and cultural, releases Olson's focus. Clearly everything will be drawn into its field without him exercising too boldly any scheme of his own. No one specific emotion itself sets up that force field…. Thus lifted into an urgent, public realm, the immediate emotional charge of the poems uncovers something precious: a rare articulation of thinking's most beautiful act, its power of arrival rather than resolution. A young woman in a red hat stands beside an old man in blue trunks at the edge of some water. No one dies of cancer, they die when they can no longer support a second life overtaking their own. They die of circumstances. They die when all the pieces are in place, when each blue is complemented by a red. Death is finality. Ironic, isn't it, that cancer is the disease of new beginnings, the fatal result of a few cells trying to start up all over again.

Stanza upon stanza, Olson draws new breath against the resonance of their breaks. On the upbeat, unexpectedly, each subsequent cluster of lines carries the poem forth. The attention is generous but relentless. The thin old man is lowered into the surf by the tall young woman and he swims out "to where the gulls sit." The details are narrative, yet their accumulation describes no story, each stanza seems to be all there is to tell, but is never quite that. In the longest poem, "Whales," Olson allows himself to go inside a whale, inside a photograph of beached whales, inside the view before a window, telling us all the while what is eventually happening. He hides nothing, unlike a good story teller. Finally, he brings us to himself and Florence, side by side … with no division between body and head.

Throughout a second recent Olson book, not primitive unity, but twentieth-century separation abounds. Aesthetics is a succession of twenty-eight poems, each of whose stanzas crack, revealing planes of a crystallography unseen in The Florence Poems…. The sequence is a philosophical consideration of "style," and like the songs of troubadours these poems are eager to depict their audience's recently acquired intelligence, wealth and sophistication. Each remark, each image is propped up like a cutout by the self-conscious lack of sentimentality style demands and high art dictates. Each of the poems becomes a cardboard mise en scène displayed one after the other upon the stage of a Victorian child's miniature theater. Depth is an illusion created by a series of receding, sensual planes, rather than a plastic, emotional phenomenon. One imagines these settings falling into acts, then perhaps a drama.

Behind the scenes money, sex, and power proffer in the glare of an amyl nitrite rush…. (pp. 8-9)

Distance remains a crucial factor. While none intervenes between us and style, the expanse separating us from art is wider than the Atlantic….

As Americans we suffer from a sore lack of middle distances, without which it is impossible to perceive or maintain anything that doesn't depend for its being upon raw nerve and ambition. U.S. aesthetics so far results in the Shakers on one hand and Las Vegas on the other….

Aesthetics and The Florence Poems provide their reader with a rich study in serious intent. How I admire their language, its cadence and self-assured grammatical vigor, its bid for permanence. But what do I mean by permanence? I mean that I admire the meaningfulness of the language, which I take to be a human expression of trust in the content each poem contains (or may conceal). And too, I praise and value their occasion. When these things are said in both books is equal in worth to the act of saying them. These are all early concerns, appropriate to the beginning of an enterprise and that is where I put American poetry today. Our language has just begun to develop a sense of space and perspective which allows for recognition as well as speculation. In other words, we're on our way out from under the burden of territory and frontier.

It is my pleasure to commend and hail these books by Toby Olson as they appear, not upon our horizon, but within ear range. (p. 9)