The Cave

Hand art on Paleolithic cave walls is the artery, but observations like cut gemstones are woven into Tom Holmes' exciting tapestry of The Cave with its hunger for mystery to balance you along the edge: When the wall opens, / I am lightning in the antelope's antlers / and the stripe along its jaws. These poems wrestle with the concept of time. They want to capture time, yet realize that time is elusive. So, they attempt to understand time through concrete experience, which poses its own dilemma. Even The Needle, a vehicle which hopes to stitch the fabric designed to apprehend time, is ephemeral: Let me tell you about the needle. / It is and it is not. It points / to what will be, and what it isnt... Undeterred, the poet continues his quest. Enjoy this exciting journey through the primordial future. --Alan Britt, judge for the 2013 Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award.

Tom Holmes is the editor of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics. He is also author of Poems for an Empty Church (Palettes & Quills Press, 2011), The Oldest Stone in the World (Amsterdam Press, 2011), Henri, Sophie, & the Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound: Poems Blasted from the Vortex (BlazeVOX Books, 2009), Pre-Dew Poems (FootHills Publishing, 2008), Negative Time (Pudding House, 2007), After Malagueña (FootHills Publishing, 2005), and Poetry Assignments: The Book (Sage Hill Press, forthcoming). He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize seven times, and his work has appeared a number of times on Verse Daily, as well as numerous journals. His current prose writing efforts about wine, poetry book reviews, and poetry can be found at his blog, The Line Break @ thelinebreak.wordpress.com/.