"The physicist holds fast to his doubt, but what's at stake for Holmes is faith—faith in its usual religious connotation and faith in the human ability to sustain love. The poet cannot quite believe in either, but her desire is strong. The book's opening poem, 'Pathetic Fallacy,' introduces the theme of love by undermining it. The speaker is leaving someone, driving into clouds where rain falls without reaching earth ('unconsummated rain,' she calls it), remembering the caustic chemicals at the hairdresser's the day before her failed marriage, reminding herself not to be seduced by her own lush language. Then, she ends in favor of what can be known:

No, I drove away from you knowing
     nothing's
writ large on the world's plain face
but this: water gathers itself
out of air, into clouds;
gathers itself, grows heavy, falls,
and waits to gather again.

The Romantic impulse is always present but always suspect. In a sense, Holmes quarrels with her own instincts. Every thought is subject to a scrutinizing, scientifically informed intelligence. Nothing here can be taken at face value, not even the imagery. . . .

"In the end, how the questions are asked is what matters. When I first read "Aviary,' it struck me as an important poem for just such reasons. Now, ten years later, I find in it all the staying power of achieved art, and its ending brings together the separate realms that make this book challenging and distinctive. The lyrical voice of 'Aviary' finds a new power of affirmation without turning from what the mind knows:

                         There, pigeons
hung to the stone facade that hid them
in saints' gray robes: why
these clung to the cathedral, or what sky
meant to the gaudy others, whose wings
were crippled beyond all flying,
were questions better unasked. In flight
ourselves, we risk our own straight
routes to winds and customs, risk lift
and questions: yet the tropical calls
from the garden, Oaxaca, were almost
     inaudible
or, Oaxaca, unbearably shrill."

—Judith Kitchen, Georgia Review, Fall 1994.

Anhinga Press, 1994.
ISBN 0-938078-37-2. $10.00 paperback. 64 pages.
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