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"Holmes's allegiance, it turns out, is to the details—the singular mystery of cloven lemons ripening into fractured suns, that particular slant of postsolstice light on snowy ground. There's palpable loneliness shot through this terrain, much of it set in a sort of afterwards—after the love affair sours, after the house is emptied, the photographs yellowed, the injuries scarred over. The better, and more disturbing, poems shatter traditional narrative form by injecting panicked asides and disembodied cries for help that leave little chance for an unscathed escape. . . ." —Josie Rawson, Rain Taxi "While sorting through her father's things after his death, acclaimed poet Janet Holmes uncovered two of the journals he kept during the 1920s. These journals became the source material for much of the poetry in Holmes's second collection, The Green Tuxedo. Excerpts from his diaries are interposed with Holmes's own efforts to create a portrait of her father as a young man. One poem is a 76-line list of names copied from the journal under the title 'Wild Women I Have Known,' and the next poem speculates its meaning: 'I search my father's scrapbook with its photographs and clippings: round faces with beestung lips. His type? and the decade got named for the sounds the wild make.' The result is deeply affecting and deeply cool." —Anne Ursu, City Pages "Janet Holmes' first book, The Physicist at the Mall, introduced us to a remarkable new voice: fiercely intelligent, buoyant with humor, alert to mysteries of language and landscape. The Green Tuxedo more than fulfills the earlier book's promise, adding to it a formal inventiveness and mastery that amazes and delights. . . . If any recent book could capture a new and reluctant audience for poetry, this is it." —Tom Andrews ISBN 0-268-01036-6. $12.00 paperback. 72 pages. |
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