The Size of Dark Cherries by Lisa Olsson

“I am the pilgrim, lips to the reliquary,” Lisa Olsson writes in her evocative debut, The Size of Dark Cherries, an elegy for life’s cycle, its upheavals, bounty, and codas. She resists as she revisits, unready to sweep the composts, oft-told tales, and unkept secrets. In these impressionistic lyrics and character narratives, Olsson shares her disquiet over her senile mother, “a weird child” who remembers the daily visits of crows but not the lies she’d always told. It’s the long reach of her vibrant late father, the “king of possibility,” crooner on Arthur Godfrey, clearer of dead trees, whose hand she accepts, in her abundant, closing praise poem: “You sharpened my saw./You gave me a dahlia, symmetry”.

–Amy Holman

Lisa Olsson says only what is needful and no more. In The Size of Dark Cherries, she keeps vast things small: feathers and strawberries stand in for the love that links generation to generation. But the beautiful restraint in how she accomplishes this! Read “Compost,” an early poem in the collection, where seeing “a strawberry sepal” brings to mind “my daughter / eating / shortcake last Sunday, / my joy red.” And then, “O Father,” the final poem, where memory leads to “a strawberry field sopped with dew / a grape, it’s whitish bloom.” But don’t think these poems are small in their ambitions. Olsson knows the pains of divorce, of loss of kin, and gives us pause to remember. I think of haiku, their concision and depth of feeling. I think of choosing to live with hope and bravery, or as Olsson says, “I mourn my own loss but I am not sad.”

–Gillian Cummings