“A stillness pervades Film Poems,” Eric Noonan of the Small Book Press Review began in his review of Redell Olsen’s book. “The book dramatizes a kind of celestial mechanics of the spirit, and the concepts have been incorporated into a complexity that preceded them…” According to Noonan, Olsen’s collection “assumes a prominent place amid an oeuvre that’s characterized by a rigorous, speculative intellectualism and an open inquiry into diverse issues related to the arts,” thus necessitating (or at least accommodating) the possibility of viewing Film Poems within a larger context of Olsen’s other theoretical and critical writings, a goal he sets out to fulfill. So Noonan continues in his elaborately in-depth review:

The quality that sets Redell Olsen’s Film Poems apart is what one might describe as their call for civilization in the widest sense – the sense in which anyone at all does not possess civilization, but creates it.  The theoretical writing that accompanies these poems cites such everyday creativity as a prerequisite for reading them.

You can read the entire review here, at the Small Book Press Review.