12 Image Poems

by Norman J. Olson. Beaver Lake Press, 946 N. McKnight Rd. Maplewood, MN. 55119-3635.

Book Review by Michael Basinski

Entering a Norman J. Olson book is much like entering a bar filled with exotic dancers, male and female, and pimps and gun and knife wielding bandit bikers and various drunken outlaws. In a sense, one wonders what one will encounter. And up at the bar it is anybody’s guess because Norman J. Olson’s imagination runs the court with the ball. His poems take an incident and overwhelm that incident into a constellations of words until the thing itself, for instance, in this book of 12 poems, stepping inside a mega-mall becomes 15 and more lines of image upon image oven both in and out of his position in world and mind until the imagination concurs and succinctly represents that instant and, of course, it is most terrifying and simultaneously exciting and lovely.