Sample Poems and Praise for “In The Tall Grasses”
About this book…
What is our place in this world, what part do we play in its drama or the politics of nature? While we live in our tall grasses it is difficult to see the world around us for what it is, difficult to find our path, difficult to know what is beyond the fronds.
Is our place determined by god or genetics? Is our place defined by the things we hold around us? Does our place in the world even matter?
Life in our tall grasses can be mystifying. These poems examine some of our relationships with nature, our gods, our things and other life around us – for what purpose – to what end and once this life is done with us and we travel to our far fields how does that relationship change for those left behind and for our future souls?
Age old questions – yes. Difficult to answer – yes, but perhaps addressed from a different perspective traveling within our own tall grasses.
Sample Poems
Hurricane Season
Every now and then the wind reminds us
of the truth of things,
knocks down our doors in a drunken stupor
and has its way with us,
takes a deep breath of our indifference
and spews it back, gaping,
gasping at what we have done,
unholy
as it has become.
Every now and then the wind reminds us
of what we are a part of.
My Body, My Church
Suppose it’s easy to know
yourself without skin
and the blood it carries,
to expose yourself to the world
as breath and fume and fury
never to feel or kneel with the weight
of existence weary around you.
How, then, would others know this thing
without skin and you them?
It, visited by love and pain
without the torment.
How, then, to become angelic without the body
that harvests understanding
and its writhing that makes you cry for god?
The Falling
I fall to rise and take my falling fast.
I feel myself in dreams I hope to know.
I learn by holding those that never last.
I feel by thinking how to hold my past
And know myself by what I need to sow.
I fall to rise and take my falling fast.
To those who know a part of me, you asked:
Where are you going? I go where I go.
I need to follow dreams that cannot last.
A tree gives us its lumber. Its fate, cast,
But roots that always bend may always grow.
It falls to rise and takes its falling fast.
A beast can know a man, its care steadfast
But hunger sharpens fangs, makes care hollow.
Finally, we learn from what does not last.
This fear keeps me dry but my roots are vast.
What falls always falls. I would always know.
I fall to rise and need my falling fast
To learn by holding dreams that never last.
Praise for In The Tall Grasses
Michael Olson’s poetry is the work of a latter-day Merlin—ordinary words are transformed through his deft alchemy. No book flap or blurb could afford enough space do justice to this impressive collection. Olson’s poems are often complex, occasionally mystifying, yet genuine and ultimately accessible. We are constantly riveted by his revelations and invited to consider questions and phenomena which rarely occur to us. We inhabit the mind of a hawk looking for lunch hiding in the tall grasses. In the natural world, all creatures are unknowingly caught up in a pitched battle for survival, yet they live on the knife-edge of mortality so peacefully. Why can’t we humans graciously accept our own place in the sweet and fragile mystery of life? We learn how a father explains to his young children not to fear the monsters who lurk in the world around them—because he ate them, going so far as to describe how they taste like stinky cheese and old shoes. In “Distant Things,” what would we be called if others had not named us? In “Costume Jewelry,” items passed on by relatives speak and vibrate still with the lives of their former wearers. In the heartbreaking “My Dementia Dance with God,” the sweet and fragile mystery of life is set in the starkest relief. “A Mother’s Portrait” tells of the latent grief a son experiences when he considers how a life of hard work has vilified his mother’s body and spirit. Every single poem in In the Tall Grasses scintillates with rich language and imagery; a gift to be relished and savored. Over and over again.
Joanne Greenway, author of Low-hanging Fruit, True Confessions and Limited Engagement.
“There is a hunger for the knowing,” Michael Olson writes in the title poem of his debut collection, In the Tall Grasses. These richly imagined poems grapple with existential questions and invite the reader to ponder his or her place in a world that is not always—or often—kind. What is the role of faith in such a world? When are we hunter and when are we prey? Olson asks the unanswerable, and yet these poems are not without resolution, reminding us that “this riddle of ignorance/ solved only with our living in each other’s arms.”
Pauletta Hansel, Cincinnati Poet Laureate Emeritus and author of Will There Also Be Singing?
YingYang Poetry 