Human Nature

By Toby Olson

Olson's first book of new poetry in sixteen years. Human Nature is the poet and novelist Toby Olson's first book of new poetry since We Are the Fire (New Directions, 1984). The intervening years saw five of his novels published to strong critical acclaim. "But," says Olson, "one day I woke from fiction to discover I'd not written a poem in close to ten years. How to return to poetry after being away from it so long?" Certainly not in repetition of things done before. In Human Nature, Olson joins the novelist's art to the poet's reflections of friends and events and times gone by. When memory fades, replaced by story, the reader of these remarkable narrative meditations begins to realize the ways in which poetry might disclose different truths, born of the reinvention of experience. "In Human Nature," says Olson, "even the most autobiographical poems let fiction in."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811214400
• ISBN13: 9780811214407
• Release Date: April 2000
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Dreams, Desires, and Mournful Memories

Of extraordinary beauty and power, Toby Olson's new poems plumb the depths of "human nature," its dreams, desires, and mournful memories -- a woman dancing on a table in a bar, a mother who has lost her mind, two close friends talking to each other about dying. A moving tribute to parents, siblings, lovers, and friends -- the poet's own bold "face in the bandages of memory." In Olson's long-awaited return to poetry from his award-winning fiction (Seaview), this work is, once again, as timeless as human nature itself. It promises to resonate with poets and nonpoets alike, with what is profoundly human in all of us.