Reconstruction by Walter Holland

 

Walter Holland’s Reconstruction is an autobiographical depiction of the years when the poet and his family lived in Virginia, a society where Black people had to endure the dehumanizing legacy of Jim Crow. Nowadays, there are those who refer to the 1950s as the time when “America was great. ” Yes, great for white people, but unfair to the descendants of the enslaved, to all other people of color, and to those who were different—“the Others.”

 

Holland achieves a miracle in Reconstruction: his quaint, beautiful poems, filled with a yearning lyricism, capture, without anger, the lovely appearances of that world, where good manners required, among other things, to be complicit in the violent treatment of those who were considered inferiors.

 

These are affecting and surprising poems; Holland’s musicality lures us into entering a realm of gentility, of appearances, under which great crimes were being committed. Reconstruction makes me question my present life: to what injustices am I being complicit— just to hold on to my comfortable existence?

–Jaime Manrique, author of My Night with Federico García Lorca 

 

“Nostalgia can act as camouflage” writes Walter Holland in “Tobacco Shacks,” one of the many poems in this collection that evoke in deep detail the people, landscapes, social dynamics and structures (physical, social, and psychic) that mark the deeply problematic, racist Virginia of the 1950s and 1960s that the poet grew up in. Even as he recognizes the effect of the sheen of memory and the seeming simplicities and graces of his childhood and youth as a Southern white male, he deeply probes the pieties, lies, silences, and damages of a place defined by its divisions and its toxic inequities around race and class. This book is a poignant, heartfelt, and open-hearted exploration of an era remembered and reconstructed.

–David Groff, author of Clay

 

Walter Holland’s intensely poetic eye has long been focused on New York City and Fire Island during the AIDS-ravaged 1980s and 90s. Here, in Reconstruction, he turns to Lynchburg, Virginia, the segregated city and state he grew up in during the mid-twentieth century. Not surprisingly, then, the tone of these poems are in keeping with those of his AIDS poems: mournful, elegiac, anxious, and hopeful that America might change for the betterment of all, gay and straight, and black and white …

–Steven Cordova, author of Long Distance