Inside the Storm I Want To Touch the Tremble by Carolyn Oliver
Review by Millie Tullis
University of Utah, 2022
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Carolyn Oliver’s debut full-length collection, Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble, begins with a question. In “My Son Asks if I Would Rather Live in a House Infested by Bees or a House Infested by Koalas,” the speaker takes the son’s question seriously, picturing what it would really mean, what it would feel like, to share the intimate space of a home with these animals—sleeping and eating and living alongside their beauty and their danger. Koalas seem the safer choice, as the speaker recalls how her father had been allergic to bees and in his childhood “had a friend whose mother died— / suffocated when a wasp, or a bee, sung her throat.” Choosing the koala infestation brings “the slow click of claws in the dark, days / safe in a house full of sleep.” Yet, the speaker doesn’t end her response with the safe choice of the koala-house. Instead, she confesses:
… But sometimes—
it feels right to tell you this—sometimes
inside the storm I want to touch the tremble
of a colony warming its queen. I want
walls seeping honey. I want a willing tongue.
In the opening poem and throughout this collection, Oliver’s imagery reveals that the everyday often holds a hidden gorgeousness. While many of these poems’ voices come from across history and mythology, there is also a strong, contemporary I. She watches boys argue as they get off the bus, she calls a friend, her small son asks her impossible questions – koalas or bees forever? She remembers her girlhood, she reads poetry, she reads books that belong to others, noting their penciled annotations and dog-eared bookmarks, their “fingerprint in pencil” lingering on the page.
Lingering on these small moments and images, Oliver cracks ordinary into wide-open-wonder. “Love Poem with Fiddlehead Ferns,” begins, “May rain and you surprise me / with a gift—not these ferns…” Although the fiddlehead ferns are not the gift, the speaker spends most of the poem describing the absent ferns. She images how they would be savored “with lemon and salt, / butter.” She compares their shape to “seahorse tails or bisected / nautilus shells.” The end of the short poem returns the reader to the actual gift: the beloved’s mouth “tulip soft at my ear. Wet with spring.” Oliver’s creation-through-negation at the poem’s opening is a gift to her readers: allowing them to savor the absent ferns and the surprising, soft sensation of the beloved’s mouth revealed, close the ear.
Though these poems often celebrate small moments and images, everyday life, as described by Oliver, weaves danger and love tightly together. “Elementary” begins: “Most mornings I deliver my child / into the arms of strangers.” But on this day, the child is not safe in his school lovingly “papered in apples and rainbows, // pencils and stars.” On this day the school is locked down after “a shell cracks: something / brackish spurts. Fighting, maybe guns.” Later, the speaker’s child tells her about being inside of the lockdown. He delivers the message “calmly, as if there is no other way,” to describe
how they turned their desks into shields
“like Captain America,” how they huddled
near the sink where they wash away
paint and glue, how they were oh so quiet,
how today, they needed to be perfect.
Oliver’s poems also reflect a deep attention to the strange and wonderful nature of language itself. In “Reading Szymborska under a Harvest Moon,” the speaker explains that although she doesn’t
know a word of Polish,
or even how to pronounce the consonants
bunched like root vegetables, or variables,
I adore her poems offered this way:
the spine’s shadowed curve a double tilde dividing
original and English versions…
The speaker enjoys performing a “minor unearthing” as she reads between the Polish and English pages: “I pick out an i for and, czas for time…” Then, near the end of the poem, the speaker remembers how
a word can mean more than once,
like turn, crane, fair, field, lie, sign, strike, quick
like magazine, a word you think you know,
a place to hold what might explode.
Although this poem begins in the simple and the quiet—the speaker is a reader herself, slowly working through a book of poems and enjoying the language she does and does not know—the ending cracks open the tool itself. Language is revealed to be dangerous, even the words “you think you know.”
Oliver’s poems in this collection make connections across time (personal, mythical, and historical) and in a garden of speakers— Eve, Saints Agnes and Ursula, Emily Dickson, and others— enter poems, often colliding with impossible contemporaries. Eve is a frequent speaker, appearing in “Eve Grinds Pigments for Artemisia Gentileschi,” “Eve Condoles with the Rokeby Venus after the Suffragette Slashing,” “Eve Makes a Target for William Tell,” and “Eve and Psyche Arrive for a Shift at the Mirror Factory”. In one of my favorites, “Eve Studies Cezanne’s The Basket of Apples,” Eve craves the middle apple in Cezanne’s painting. To me, the poem’s title reads like Eve is standing in front of the painting at a gallery. Or Eve may be delivering a lecture. She begins, “Temptation’s lesson says: choose / the uncontested one, pear-shaped, alone.” But then Eve begins to speak, somehow, straight to my core:
But I want the one in the middle,
the sweet green that holds its shape,
the round, sour taste of knowledge.
I want perfection. I want what’s mine.
And if you think that table’s impossible,
try obedience.
The poems of Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble play with a wide variety of forms and conceits. Oliver moves between black out poems and erasures (“Hymn in My Sickness”), mirrored names (“Cary/Carrie”), dialogues between historical and mythical speakers (“Saint Ursula Advises Emily Dickinson”), prose poems (“Do Not Fail to Yield”), list poems, aubades, and ghazals. Oliver has complied a book of poems that constantly shift in their forms, shapes, and stakes. Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble is a book I’d love to teach to poets, new and emerging and established (whatever those terms mean). As I read and re-read this book, Oliver’s poems continually surprise— reminding me how many ways a poem can be made, how many things a poem can do. In one of Oliver’s shortest and most surprising poems, “In Your Copy of Akhmatova’s Poems,” the speaker-reader studies how the page corner “springs, in your decisive way, over / the edge of her four elegant lines. / Then: the long, white winter page.”
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Millie Tullis is a writer and folklorist from northern Utah. She is the author of a micro-chap, Dream With Teeth (Ghost City Press, 2023). Her work has been published in Sugar House Review, Rock & Sling, Cimarron Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Psaltery & Lyre.
Image description: Cover of Carolyn Oliver’s Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble.
Psaltery & Lyre 