A Cage in Search of a Bird by Kathleen Holliday

 

Sometimes tongue-in-cheek but always insightful and brimming with poetic vignettes provided by nature’s gifts, Kathleen Holliday‘s new collection is thought provoking, wise, and rich with island imagery.  Like a beachcomber of her own life, she picks up the most unassuming objects and uses the lighthouse beam of her poet’s eye to show us the beauty and sadness embedded there. These poems are quieter than her previous works; a little richer with imagery and a little darker, with beautifully wrought images derived from everyday occurrences that she elevates to higher observations of our world and our understanding of it. In this age of social media, AI, and the frantic noise of news and the horrors of our world, the profound gift of Holliday’s poems ring quiet and true – this collection of poems is a calm anchor that links us back to our spiritual roots.

–H.M. Sanders, author of The Widowed Warlock, and Ringmaker fantasy series.

 

 

A Cage in Search of a Bird presents us with human existence as translated into the lingua naturae of the non-human world. The sun and the moon and the ocean. Summer and winter. The ghost of the author’s cat, reminding her of the simplicity of gratitude for what is.

 

I move through the day/breasting waves/toeing for certainty/swaying like kelp. More often, letting go/giving in to buoyancy. (“Learning to Swim”)

 

In these pages you will find the tender trusting hope of a child at rest, and the experience, both universal and intimate, of grief and loneliness and death.

 

As if drought could ever empty it/the well of grief glimmers full/topped up like a bitter drink/we never ordered. (“August”)

 

Here, too, there is reassurance that others have forged a path on which we may, faltering, fall back, before finding our own way forward.

 

There’s no need then to fear/those ahead/have set the darkness echoing. (“Reading Poetry During a Power Outage”)

 

The book ends with an invitation to connection, a call to join hands like two otters rafting against the vicissitudes of the waves. And isn’t that the point of all writing—creating connection? With her spare and gorgeous poems, Holliday does just that. My recommendation: heed the invitation, leap joyfully into the spaces created by A Cage in Search of a Bird.

–Shari Lane, managing editor, SHARK REEF Literary Magazine, author of Two Over Easy All Day Long