Poetry

The ms of my kin

F2F

Humanophone

“…I was immediately taken by the true originality of conception, the inventive audacity, the subtlety of phrasing and vocabulary of Janet Holmes’ poems. Music in these pieces becomes a metaphor, a true metaphor that cannot be paraphrased but sends out its illuminating beams over the mystery, the diaphanous continuity and utter singularity of our lives, our life. The delicacy and subtlety of her work have grown with each reading.”

—W.S. Merwin, Citation from Pablo Neruda Award first prize.

University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.
ISBN 0-268-03055-3. $15.00 paperback. 86 pages.
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The Green Tuxedo

“Holmes’s allegiance, it turns out, is to the details—the singular mystery of cloven lemons ripening into fractured suns, that particular slant of postsolstice light on snowy ground. There’s palpable loneliness shot through this terrain, much of it set in a sort of afterwards—after the love affair sours, after the house is emptied, the photographs yellowed, the injuries scarred over. The better, and more disturbing, poems shatter traditional narrative form by injecting panicked asides and disembodied cries for help that leave little chance for an unscathed escape. . . .”

—Josie Rawson, Rain Taxi

“While sorting through her father’s things after his death, acclaimed poet Janet Holmes uncovered two of the journals he kept during the 1920s. These journals became the source material for much of the poetry in Holmes’s second collection, The Green Tuxedo. Excerpts from his diaries are interposed with Holmes’s own efforts to create a portrait of her father as a young man. One poem is a 76-line list of names copied from the journal under the title ‘Wild Women I Have Known,’ and the next poem speculates its meaning: ‘I search my father’s scrapbook with its photographs and clippings: round faces with beestung lips. His type? and the decade got named for the sounds the wild make.’ The result is deeply affecting and deeply cool.”

—Anne Ursu, City Pages

“Janet Holmes’ first book, The Physicist at the Mall, introduced us to a remarkable new voice: fiercely intelligent, buoyant with humor, alert to mysteries of language and landscape. The Green Tuxedo more than fulfills the earlier book’s promise, adding to it a formal inventiveness and mastery that amazes and delights. . . . If any recent book could capture a new and reluctant audience for poetry, this is it.”

—Tom Andrews

ISBN 0-268-01036-6. $12.00 paperback. 72 pages.
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The Physicist at the Mall

“The physicist holds fast to his doubt, but what’s at stake for Holmes is faith—faith in its usual religious connotation and faith in the human ability to sustain love. The poet cannot quite believe in either, but her desire is strong. The book’s opening poem, ‘Pathetic Fallacy,’ introduces the theme of love by undermining it. The speaker is leaving someone, driving into clouds where rain falls without reaching earth (‘unconsummated rain,’ she calls it), remembering the caustic chemicals at the hairdresser’s the day before her failed marriage, reminding herself not to be seduced by her own lush language. Then, she ends in favor of what can be known:

No, I drove away from you knowing
nothing’s
writ large on the world’s plain face
but this: water gathers itself
out of air, into clouds;
gathers itself, grows heavy, falls,
and waits to gather again.

The Romantic impulse is always present but always suspect. In a sense, Holmes quarrels with her own instincts. Every thought is subject to a scrutinizing, scientifically informed intelligence. Nothing here can be taken at face value, not even the imagery. . . .

“In the end, how the questions are asked is what matters. When I first read “Aviary,’ it struck me as an important poem for just such reasons. Now, ten years later, I find in it all the staying power of achieved art, and its ending brings together the separate realms that make this book challenging and distinctive. The lyrical voice of ‘Aviary’ finds a new power of affirmation without turning from what the mind knows:

There, pigeons
hung to the stone facade that hid them
in saints’ gray robes: why
these clung to the cathedral, or what sky
meant to the gaudy others, whose wings
were crippled beyond all flying,
were questions better unasked. In flight
ourselves, we risk our own straight
routes to winds and customs, risk lift
and questions: yet the tropical calls
from the garden, Oaxaca, were almost
inaudible
or, Oaxaca, unbearably shrill.”

—Judith Kitchen, Georgia Review, Fall 1994.

Anhinga Press, 1994.
ISBN 0-938078-37-2. $10.00 paperback. 64 pages.
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