The Icelandic connection - 01.09.2010, Page 42

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ICELANDIC CONNECTION
Vol. 63 #2
World.”
Publication of a volume of new and
selected poetry involves a certain risk.
Poems written a quarter century ago
might fail to retain their integrity beside
the most recent. Contemporary style,
mature thought and the sheer weight of
life experience can overwhelm earlier
work and diminish the harmony of a col-
lection. However, The Chain Letter of the
Soul is amazingly coherent. The book is
divided into four sections: I. New Poems,
II. Boxelder Bug Variations (1985), III.
The Dead Get By With Everything
(1991), and IV. Playing The Black Piano
(2004). From the earliest poems until
those written just before his death, there
exists a seamless progression. Bill’s pre-
occupation with writing and literature,
geography, nature, individual lives and
history is evident in the deceptively sim-
ple first volume Boxelder Bug Variations.
These themes expand and amplify
through his later collections to reach a
magnificent coda in the final “new
poems”.
It is a curious fact that often the
most ingenious and intense
pieces by the greatest composers,
which seem to accumulate a life-
time’s whole knowledge and
feeling into themselves, are long
sets of variations that begin with
trifles, with nothing, and build
enormous, sublime, ecstatic,
often humorous structures, (p.
109)
Bill's observation in this piece from
his earliest book predicts the actual shape
of his poetic career—a series of variations
on simple themes and trifles that build
over a lifetime to create a symphonically
sublime body of work.
Bill Holm was a master of the indi-
vidual portrait poem. His earliest poems
celebrate the characters of small town
Minnesota, the individual and the local.
Rose, her face pinched toward God,
used to disappear during church picnics.
The men spread out in the field until they
found her preaching in Icelandic to the
cornstalks with a loud voice, (p. 125)
The farmers of Polk County assem-
bled to help one of their own:
My dad told me how the sheriff
would ride out to the farm to auc-
tion off the farmer’s goods for the
bank. Neighbours came with
pitch forks to gather in the yard:
(p. 126)
The cameo portrait of his mother
Jonina Sigurborg Josephson Holm is
shared with us:
Jona used nylon stockings as
rope, made cats out of beer bot-
tles and light bulbs, Christmas
angels from rolled-up newspa-
pers, (p. 102)
These American Gothic originals,
that read like an Icelandic-American
Spoon River Anthology, are created with
humour and much love. In the new poem
section these new world minatures
expand to celebrate the folk around Bill’s
new home place in Brimnes in Hofsos,
Iceland. Bill’s impeccable ear has sur-
vived the transatlantic crossing, and his
eye for detail and gesture applies itself to