Down from the Sycamores: Poems by Richard Holinger

 

Richard Holinger’s Down from the Sycamores reads like an old-style cabinet of curiosities—each poem opens a drawer to its own precise and glittering arrangement. Holinger knows his influences: European history, the fine arts, and in poetry, and deploys them like “an Olympic runner lighting routes,” that is—expertly. Holinger effectively wields persona and ekphrasis, but at the same time brings his narratives right through our bones, his words wind through “this green forest / in circles right and swift / as swirls in the blue Loire.”

–Sandra Marchetti is the author of two collections of poetry, Aisle 228 (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2023), and Confluence (Sundress Publications 2015), and four chapbooks of poetry and lyric essays. Her poetry appears in Poet Lore, Blackbird, Ecotone, Southwest Review, and Subtropics, and has published essays in The Rumpus, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is Poetry Editor Emerita at River Styx Magazine.

 

For those of us who have been to Paris, and those who only dream of going, Richard Holinger‘s new book of poems is a treasure trove of words and images. Holinger begins with a bizarre account of a streetwise “fire-eater,” then captures the everyday lives of transients in the Paris metro. He moves seamlessly to the more aesthetic realms of the Louvre, an ekphrastic celebration, and finally on to the “polar express,” in which readers become virtual Arctic explorers. Holinger’s adventure of art and ice propels us on a journey in which the unexpected astonishes and delights the reader, from start to finish.

–Donna Pucciani has published worldwide, in Shi Chao Poetry, Poetry Salzburg, ParisLitUp, and her work has been translated into German, Chinese, Japanese, and Italian. A recent seventh poetry collection, EDGES, has been followed by her new chapbook, Ghost Garden.

 

Chief among the many pleasures to be found in Richard Holinger’s Down from the Sycamores is the poet’s ekphrastic poems, or poems about paintings.  Holinger’s lush descriptions, subtle forging of narratives, and economical wit make these paintings come alive, as in “Arcimboldo’s Faces,” in which “an apparition / is implied in the pairing of opposites, / a fruition of facing / one’s worst reflection in untried glass.”  Here, as elsewhere in the book, what ekphrastic poems do above all is to measure “the gazer’s spirit,” in Shelley’s words.  This collection also includes tactile and historically resonant depictions of the Loire Valley, marked by “rain / leaving warm mosaic prints,” and an astonishingly inhabited and paced rendition of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s failed 1916 sea voyage to Antarctica.  Down from the Sycamores is a variegated bouquet of lyric thought, sound, and sight, which will move as well as enliven the reader.

–Christina Pugh is a Consulting Editor for Poetry, the 2019 Juniper Prize winner, a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship recipient, and a professor of English at University of Illinois at Chicago. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Author of four poetry collections, her most recent book collects her essays on poetry, Ghosts and the Overplus (University of Michigan).