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Humanophone » Reviews and Comments
"...I was immediately taken by the
true originality of conception, the inventive audacity,
the subtlety of phrasing and vocabulary of Janet
Holmes' poems. Music in these pieces becomes a
metaphor, a true metaphor that cannot be paraphrased but
sends out its illuminating beams over the mystery, the
diaphanous continuity and utter singularity of our
lives, our life. The delicacy and subtlety of her work
have grown with each reading."
—W.S. Merwin, Citation from Pablo Neruda Award first prize.
"Witty, learned, bedazzling, bold: the poems of Janet Holmes' new book veer before our eyes from clarity and good humor into aesthetic mystery and a darker irony. This poet is beautifully unpredictable as to subject and mode, the variety of her purposes winningly enlivening the forms they invent. For her, music is more than metaphor. It is the characteristic shape of her breath, a way of beholding. As Humanophone testifies, the idea of a human-voice instrument is enacted, again and again, in the notation and perfect pitch of these poems."
—James Applewhite
Read poems from Humanophone:
"Little
Elegy for Flute"
"Partch
Stations"
