ANDREA HOLLAND: BORROWED Smith/Doorstep Books The Poetry Business Bank Street Arts 32-40 Bank Street Sheffield S1 2DS UK ISBN 978 1 902382 91 3 £3 visit the website of Smith/Doorstep Books Web design by This page last updated: 28th June 2008. |
ANDREA HOLLAND: BORROWED | |
At a poetry reading recently, Paddy Bushe cited the simile as rare as a good villanelle and rueful laughter was general among the audience, most of whom had probably encountered the form as homework for their creative writing class. The villanelle leapt back into fashion in the latter half of the twentieth century and seems determined to stay there. Like that other terribly popular form, the sestina, the villanelle is all about repetition with variation; making order of multiplicity. It is easy to forge theories about why such a concern might suit the poets of our age, and plenty of literary critics have done so. Philip Jason has accused the villanelle of a kind of schizophrenia - a form that pretends certainty and resolution even while it festers and broods in a closed roomover some obsessive question. Given the assurance and verve with which Andrea Holland employs the devices of repetition and variation throughout her short collection BORROWED, it is interesting, then, that the opening poem should be entitled ON NOT WRITING A VILLANELLE: I do not want to make a stone horse that is trying to and cannot smell the air, said Barbara Hepworth, the woman who disappears in fire.It — and many of the poems in BORROWED — is loyal to the spirit of the traditional form even while breaking all its rules. Holland's poems are inspired by paintings, novels, library cards, a jazz band interpreting a Nirvana song: this is a poetry of adaptation. ON HEARING A JAZZ TRIO PLAY SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT BY NIRVANA: ...The melody's been pushed around, an amiable steering as if, left as it was, it might come to harm, something might go terribly wrong...And adaptation, as Chris Cooper says in the film of the same name is a profound process. It means you figure out how to thrive in the world.Instead of becoming a slave to the mores of art and culture, BORROWED seems to say that art and culture are there to be bent to life's needs. BORROWED was one of three winners in last year's Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition. Its sixteen poems are wide-ranging, connected by their concern with art, music and literature - and by their curiosity and intelligence. To misquote Philip Jason this time, it could be said that all poetry festers and broods in a closed roomPerhaps that is even what poetry ought to do. But it must look outwards too, be always open and questing — and Andrea Holland's poetry is certainly that. | ||
reviewer: Ailbhe Darcy. |