On the Wing: American Poems of Air and Space Flight by Karen Yelena OlsenMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I'm not much of a poetry person. On the rare occasions that I read any, about 90% of it does nothing for me. Too abstract, too vague, too flowery. But every once in a while, there's a bit that does make an impression.
On The Wing is a poetry collection all about flight, and it wasn't an exception to that 90% rule of thumb. Much of the parts that didn't click for me were about the feeling of flying, largely by pilots or those writing about pilots. It's not that I don't enjoy a bit of romanticism about flight...there are some songs I like that fit that description...but the format here didn't work for me.
The 10% that I did find interesting, though, was pretty good. Much of it was about passenger flight, which makes sense considering that I've spent a lot of time as a passenger. Rosanna Warren's "from North", for instance, the first section of which is about the feeling of being a passenger while flying through dangerous weather. And Simon Ortiz's "A San Diego Poem" that describes a whole trip, including feeling a bit lost in an airport after disembarking. I also enjoyed several in the section related to military flight, most notably "Tuskegee Airfield" by Marilyn Nelson Waniek.
This collection was published in 2004, but most of it came from prior to 2001. That means there's very little written after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Only one poem makes a direct reference, "History of the Airplane" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (written in 2002). Oh, there's still a few pieces that deal with hijackings, but they don't have the kind of urgency and trauma that you'd expect from people who lived through that day. I suspect that similar works written in the last two decades are quite a bit more focused on security and danger.
Poetry is never going to be my favored form of writing. Given the right subject matter, though, I can find some pieces that I enjoy like I did with On The Wing.
