Culture asks much of the writer: filter the cacophony, exceed vernacular, deliver art. The writer may use familiar language to build an extraordinary world, to make an unusual character an analog for the self, to transform that self into a friend. She may excel at documentation, recording observations in exquisite lines that juxtapose agricultural ritual with scientific discovery, interior reflection with external reproach. Poet Lisa Olstein is this writer. In “Lost Alphabet” (Copper Canyon, 2009) she gives readers a collection of moths, a mysterious companion, a dark hut in an unusual country, and the eyes of a lepidoptrist asking perennial questions: What does it mean to know? Are there limits to understanding? Even in company are we anything but alone?

Slowly, the absence of pain arrives like

snow falling. It was on a day like this when, visiting, Ilya

decided to stay. At least, never left. It is customary here to

accompany the wounded. Whoever is able, and near.

Each poem is an illustrated plate colored by detail — the work of writer as collector. We learn that Vladimir Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory” brushes against the atmosphere of Marco Polo’s travel diaries, that Olstein was captivated by a landscape of moth wings. Holding a hand to the eye and rounding the fingers, the speaker of “Lost Alphabet” acts as the writer acts: narrowing focus, targeting detail.

I want nothing to end, not a single observation,

despite longing for what remains unknown. For one thing:

weight. Another: ratio. Flight’s beat, beat, glide. And

constantly, the interruption: sometimes circling for days, a

wary insistent stray.

In her new poems, myriad voices extend Olstein’s investigation. Mentions of medical experiments appear beside anecdotes of space travel. Reflection is compelled by fact, doubt undergirds perception.

Either the mute child spoke

in full sentences alone in the dark

or the monitors picked up ghosts

of deliverymen and pelicans

streaming over the bridge.

Thus Olstein asks us to consider knowledge as ephemeral, relational. She critiques certainty, exposes fact. These are important poems. They walk us to the borderline of what we take for granted and stand unflinching at the chasm, compelling us to wonder what it’s possible to know.

~Carlin M. Wragg, Editor, Open Loop Press