Barbara A. HOlland

BARBARA A. HOLLAND - SELECTED POEMS, VOLUME 2

The present volume is dedicated entirely to Holland’s cycle of poems centered around the paintings of René Magritte, originally titled Crises of Rejuvenation and first published in two volumes in 1974 and 1975, and then expanded in 1986. The two volumes of Selected Poems should be regarded as the poet’s personal choice, rescued from chapbooks and magazines, of the poems she regarded as her best, in their final form. Some punctuation changes (commas and hyphens) have been added, in keeping with my overall editing of the Barbara A. Holland papers that became available in 2019.

Although most of these poems are inspired by a Surrealist painter's work, Barbara Holland is not a literary Surrealist. There is no randomness, no impulse toward Dadaist fist-shaking. The ambiguities of meaning, the shattering of form and syntax that run rampant in some experimental and visual poems, have no place in her writing. Like Magritte with his photographic style, Holland writes in plain English, often in a narrative that could easily be read as prose to the unwitting listener with poem-phobia. Her voice speaks in complete sentences, tightly packed clauses, and unambiguous meaning. If they seem at times like run-ons, they clarify themselves on repeat readings, like a puzzle solved. The world of Barbara Holland, then, is the real one, that of a solitary literary woman living in Greenwich Village in its last Bohemian years. The twist is simply that impossible things happen there. Roses drink bottled blood, tree stumps sprout human ears, unaccompanied crutches stride the avenues, and a knife appears in the poet’s back as a permanent ornament. She writes with clarity and wit about each brand of impossibility. There is also the passivity of the spectator/voyeur in most of her poems: the poet seldom acts, but is acted upon. She is an esthetic pin-cushion. Reality annoys her more often than it delights her, and she is quick to tell you that. These poems inhabit the world-view, sense of life, and physical laws of an alternate universe. Her poetry is more aligned with weird fiction than with the sodden confessional personal poem of the 1960s.

The book includes notes about the poems based on 1985 interviews with the poet, and selected Magritte images alongside a number of the poems.

This is the 273rd publication of The Poet’s Press. Published March 2020. 140 pages, 6 x 9 inches. PDF Ebook free to read online and to download from The Internet Archive. READ OR DOWNLOAD SELECTED POEMS VOLUME 2.

BACK TO CATALOG MAIN PAGE

Version 1.1 Updated January 14, 2026.