The Dead Get by With Everything - Softcover

Holm, Bill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0915943557 ISBN 13: 9780915943555

Publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1991

About this title

Reviews

In the poem "Genealogy," Holm remembers characteristics of dead family members and sees traces of them in himself; it's like "living with all / these dead people inside me," he writes. Looking back at the real and imagined lives of his Icelandic forebears, Holm is both wistfully appreciative and mournfully sad, reminiscing about the unusual sounds of their language and bemoaning the effacement of their culture in America. He writes in a hardy, unpretentious style that is more empirical than introspective. Traveling out West, infused with the dauntless pioneer spirit of his progenitors, the poet trudges through the countryside making unprovocative connections between the cycles of nature and the dynamics of human life. The Grand Canyon prompts these thoughts: "Here we're all children waiting on a branch / for the sound of something climbing up / from the hole nothing should ever get out of." Not even death can motivate Holm ( Boxelder Bug Variations ) to probe very deeply and analyze his true feelings. In the title poem, the demise of a close friend elicits only inarticulate anger: "Who do the dead think they are! / Up and dying in the middle of the night. "
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A rural Minnesotan with Icelandic roots and a passion for music, Holm energizes conventional free verse with a variety of subjects ranging from Midwestern American politics to Bach's Goldberg Variations. The result is a book of eccentricity, charm, and, occasionally, great beauty. Noteworthy poems include "The Icelandic Language," in which there is "no industrial revolution;/ no pasteurized milk; no oxygen, no telephone;/ only sheep, fish, horses, water falling./ The middle class can hardly speak it"; the moving prose poem, "Brahms' Capriccio in C Major, Opus 76, No. 8"; and "Piano": "the hand moving in these sensual ways,/as if black dots and lines on paper/ were directions to make love, notes attached/ to little hammers in the blood for him to strike." Some fine short poems are also included . "Learning Icelandic," for example, captures in eight brief lines the dizzy dislocation of being cast aloft in a language not one's own. Recommended.
- Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Milkweed Editions
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0915943557
• ISBN 13: 9780915943555
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 92