Elegy for September

Foreword Nothing is more satisfying for a teacher than watching former students grow into the poets you believed they could become. So it has been with Stephen Holt. His first in-class poem, at the Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky several years ago, embodied in its few lines the gifts that have enabled him to become one of the best poets writing today. I don t consider this an audacious statement to make. A look at the poems inside Elegy for September should lay any doubts to rest. Few poets can render a landscape, whether interior or exterior, more keenly and poignantly. Here is a poet who listens to language and lets it lead him into the heart of the poem with authority and grace.The late A. R. Ammons remarked in a workshop that a good poem has a ceaseless core of liveliness. No matter how many times one returns to it, the poem lives, spreading its ripples endlessly. I know that the ripples from the book s title poem, recollecting a child s first experience of death, will continue to resonate inside my mind: the coffin stands centerpiece, but the child through the open windows, smells the dark/of coffee grounds from the kitchen. This closing sensory detail stands against the finality of death the hearth, the center, the place of ongoing creativity. The imagery in Holt s poems shines sheer as a barn s metal roof. Call Holt an Appalachian poet, and I m sure he d have no quibble with that, as he loves the region where he was born and has lived all his life. Its landscape speaks to him; he reads it as if it were a sacred text. But he is also a traveler, exploring his father s experience in Saarlaurten in World War II ( Patton s Soldier ), as well as the distant past in Hunting Shawnee Relics in the Corn Fields. He turns the same keen-eyed gaze upon the Southwestern landscape as he does his Appalachian subjects, framing their story straight. He can speak a poem in mountain dialect without missing a beat, and on the next page render a scene in language that is reminiscent of contemporary Irish poets, Heaney, Ni Dhomhnaill, and Muldoon, to name a few.Adrienne Rich has written, the tests I need to pass are prescribed by the spirits of place who understand travel but not amnesia. The spirits of place have graced Stephen Holt, knowing that he will remember the ground upon which he stands and the people whose voices have risen from that ground. When he travels, he carries those voices with him and thus carries an immunity to the fashionable, the slight, and the solipsistic that characterize so much poetry being written today. These spirits of place, as he declares in Quarry Rock Fence, serve as guide and comfort/on a hard stretch of landscape. Kathryn Stripling Byer