Dark,  but not cold
July 28, 2012
By Ed  Shacklee

Something always seems to temper Holt's rather bleak landscapes in The Harvest: so that after he's taken you through failed  marriages  told from several points of view, a friend's betrayal, an avuncular pedophile, a  stalker, a psychiatric facility filled with troubled, neglected children, and a mass murder, among other circles of modern hell, he'll leave you feeling lucky  to have come across this book.

"The Stalker's Villanelle," the chilling  account of a man who's about to kill his former wife, has already won critical  acclaim and is probably going to enjoy a long life in the anthologies. Of the sonnets, of which there are more than a dozen, there
are a number of standouts including "Take Me," the heart-rending but clear-eyed
account of a social  worker's visit with troubled boys, and "Our Murder," about
the details and "sensible absurdities" of divorce, which begins, "The deadest
smile that ever scaled a face", and ends: "Our talking now is just a hollow
show; / We murdered  conversation weeks ago."

There is light verse here as well and Holt is sometimes very funny, most of all when he's making fun of himself, as in "Godot  Revisited." But it's the surgical strikes he performs on himself and others you'll remember longest, I suspect. I bought this book twice because it got  soaked in my backpack during a storm, and I knew I'd want it around to dip into  now and then. It's dark, yes, but not cold. A fine book. 

Reading Jeff Holt's The Harvest. Why are so many somewhat
under-the-radar publications blowing the bigger names out of the water? "After
the Wedgwood Baptist Church Shooting" is a tremendous poem, and the vision of
these poems isn't dark in a post-Symbolist literary sense, but because the
collection deals squarely with some of the darkest elements of the lives we lead
without sensationalism.