The Essential Doug Holder
Big Table Publishing Company
ISBN: 978-1-945917-62-2
$15.00
As I read Doug Holder’s latest collection, The Essential Doug Holder, the Edward Hopper painting Nighthawks often comes to mind. In the well-recognized painting, we see a dapperly-dressed couple sitting closely together on the far side of the counter in the brightly-lit, sparse diner. But it’s not the couple that our eyes go to first, or linger on the most. It’s the other sharply-dressed diner in the fedora, who is sitting alone, his back against the world.
Doug Holder, poet and storyteller, an acute observer of the minutiae – master of irony and self-deprecation, could be that lone diner in Hopper’s famous painting.
His poetic lines are highlight-worthy. You should see my copy. Here’s a few samples of his brilliance:
From “Dreaming on the Senior Line at Market Basket”
Vinyl, cloth and plastic
wrap the world
but I dream of mangoes
or a sad-eyed haddock
joyously twirled.
From “Father Knows Best-Mother Does the Rest”
The bland tyranny
of the cardigan sweater.
From “When Father Dies”
Let him fall like
a weathered pit bull
in a three-piece suit.
From “Richard III in Hollywood”
The ghosts that haunt you
vanished
now that you
popped the Prozac.
…that you have deals to cut
evil to consummate
during your
highly-rated
winter of discontent.
Holder has a chapter entitled Eating Grief at 3 AM. Maybe that’s what the lone diner is doing in the Nighthawks painting – eating grief. And Holder, himself is no stranger to grief, watching his parents grow frail and sickly; his mother suffering from dementia, consumed with the whereabouts of her pocketbook. The loss of his affectionate grandmother, of good friends, and his colorful childhood in New York City, and later – legend in Somerville. In his poem, “Eating Grief at Bickford’s – for Allen Ginsberg,” Holder is reminiscing of a more wholesome, less complicated time, whose customers are now long gone:
The old men
who used to spout
Marxist
rants from
the cracked porcelain of their cups
are gone.
…Stains of baked beans
on their lapels
finger a piece
of passionless cod
lulled by their
own murmur.
In the poem, “Carpal Tunnel Syndrome – for my late father, Lawrence J. Holder,” Holder comes to suffer the same condition of his late father:
I thought of my father
as he gripped
his left hand
prying it open with his right
a hand curling
into a callused fetus
holding on to
something
for dear life.
And years after his death
as if possessed
I feel my own hand curling
in my right hand pocket
There’s also a feeling of singularity in a lot of Holder’s poems, the safe and equal distance that comes with practiced observation. We see this in his poem, “Unknown in a Crowd.”
And that’s when
you felt most at peace –
lost in the cornucopia.
Feeling
like the multi-eyed
fly on the wall
away from the claustrophobic intimacy.
Observing
not observed
owner of your own dialogue…
And again in the poem, “Au Bon Pain at Dusk.”
You know the skids
when the Spare Change hawker
won’t call you “young man” –
when the haunts
you slipped into
like an old shoe
are boarded
with angry wood crosses
when the glance of a beatific
Harvard girl
escapes you
with a bothered flick of her head.
It is dusk…
your knees ache clandestinely
under the table.
The prospect of sleep
awaits you
like the promise
of a young night
once did.
There are ecclesiastical ponderings in the poems, “Transcendence” and “His Last Impact on the Metropolis – based on the Boston Globe account of a man who passed away on the Red Line,” where a middle-aged man dies on the train, dropping like some flimsy theatrical prop...the trains backed up / from Cambridge to Dorchester. / Bulky, twisting metal snakes -
The processional
with passengers
on either
side of the stretcher
watching some forgotten
ineffectual man
make his mark
freezing the rush hour
stopping them
dead in their
tracks.
The Essential Doug Holder should be on every poetry lover’s bookshelf. These are unforgettable stories with multifaceted characters; dynamic language, and fresh perspectives. I read Doug Holder’s book, all 172 pages, in one sitting, not wanting it to end.
Review by Carolynn Kingyens, author of Before the Big Bang Makes a Sound
