Have just completed the volume of verse.  In my youth I would have read it in one sitting, but life has taught me better than to do that. That's why it's taken me so long to write back to you about it.

In terms of structure, your strict - admirable, disciplined - adherence to meter, rhyme and rhyme scheme is never apparent, strained or obtrusive. In fact one has to dig to find it. But it's always there.The tone is - and this is  a word of approbation that I find myself using more and more - sober. Lean, serious, unadorned and if not solemn or somber then earnest. Earnest has become my single-most preferred term, both in writing and all other aspects of life. More than honest, which can be simply a passive quality - that is, not being actively dishonest - it includes within itself qualities like uncompromising dedication to truth, and truth in its most basic, pared-down state, as well as yearning and striving.

Without yearning and striving, verse to me is dull and perfunctory, mere self-ndulgence.There is no self-indulgence, no  self-advertising in your poems. They have no dead syllables, no empty space, no  hollow sound.They also are not infected by winks at the reader, commonplaces or attempts at sensationalism. They are neither lurid nor prurient even when  dealing with death and sex.

In short, they are earnest.

 
Particularly appreciated "A Housewife," in which you again display a rare ability to employ both an intricate rhyme scheme and a perhaps even more intriguing rhythm (complete stops in mid-line, then run-on lines that  sweep the reader up and carry him forward).
 
The buried "-one" rhymes are all the more effective for being almost imperceptible.
 
Rick Rozoff

 


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.

    Author

    Hello. Jeff Holt here. While the main page is primarily a place to share my poetry, this blog is for comments.  I welcome your feedback, but please keep it relevant. This is a political/religious/
    sports/fashion etc. debate free zone (that's what Facebook is for!) I hope you enjoy.

    Archives

    October 2012
    July 2012

    Categories

    All