The Icelandic connection - 01.09.2010, Qupperneq 43

Vol. 63 #2
ICELANDIC CONNECTION
93
the new task of recording his new neigh-
bours and friends. We meet Palmi, the
banker who loves poetry, Siggi from
Husavik who answers Bill’s question
regarding the number of people who
oppose the new aluminum smelter with
perfect Icelandic irony:
. . . Siggi says, “Two- but one,” a
schoolteacher, “moved to
Reykjavik.” 1 wait. “Now there’s
me . . .” (p. 18)
Bill visits Didi and Dui as they watch
American Idol with a motherless lamb
between them on the sofa; a pastoral idyll
all their own. Bill offers us luminous
images of Pink Girl and Cows and Hafrun
on Horseback where he imagines the nine
year old far into the future in a Yeatsian
moment:
She will be quite a piece of work
at seventeen, and pure grandeur
on horseback at seventy when we
are all long dead, so we must
imagine her now on this summer
afternoon by the sea. (p. 79)
Or “Ragga’s Dog” where Bill asks ,
crankily “What’s a whippet doing in
Iceland/with his thin coat, his flying
feet?” (p. 78) All of these recent poems
and occasional pieces dedicated to friends
are snapshots of a moment that gestures
to eternity.
When Bill was not painting portraits
in language or executing poignant diora-
mas of past and present, he is celebrating
music as only a talented musician can do.
He tackles complicated classical music
subjects, germane to a musician but he
does so in a way that never alienates a
reader who does not possess his encyclo-
pedic knowledge of the form. Whether
elucidating the Diabelli Variations or
introducing us to that “odd failure of a
man” (p. 169) that was Glenn Gould, he
does so with lightness and love. His pas-
sion for the grand masters of music does
not exclude the good old Americans; the
traditional Shaker melody and the music
of Charles Ives stands beside Mozart,
Bach and Haydn. The democratic poet
does not indulge in a snobbish distinction
but shares his vast knowledge and deep
love of music with each person fortunate
to receive this Chain Letter. Perhaps his
finest musical gift to to us is contained in
“Playing Haydn for the Angel of Death”
(p. 162) in which. Bill lets us in on the
secret, that music like any other form of
art, gives us a shot at immortality.
At a recent celebration of the life of
Bill Holm, held at the University of
Manitoba’s Icelandic Library, gathered
guests heard Bill read once again. His
ambivalent relationship with technology
allowed the magic of his voice and musi-
cal performance to surround and comfort
us. What was startling was that Bill’s
speaking voice was the same voice that
comes to us through his writing. His nat-
ural, conversational speech was poetic
and his poetry was natural speech, albeit
more erudite and intelligent than most of
us can claim. The rhythms of his language
replicate the musical phrasing that graced
his piano performances. Musical jokes
are a constant of classical composition
and Bill approximated these in written
text that played upon puns and allusions
for the enlightened (Transfigured Phone
(p. 32) see Schoenberg) but never at the
expense of the reader who had no inside
knowledge of such esoteric lore. In his