The three sections of viki holmes’s miss moon’s class — writing, arithmetic, and reading — each begin with an epigraph that serves as a signpost of sorts for a segment of the journey. The first is taken from the Dresden Dolls’ “Coin Operated Boy,” the second from Don Quixote, and the third from a blog entry on planetary linguistics. That sequence is a good indicator of just how surreal this journey will be. (Any collection that begins with a Brechtian Punk Cabaret is off to a good start!) Holmes is attentive to place as she moves from Cornwall to Wales, through Australia to Hong Kong; but these poems, suspicious of lines drawn on maps, are at home in a world of boundary crossing — “if you draw a map / the world still turns where your pencil // held it flat…” (83).
Holmes has an ear for the music of language and an eye for the shape of the poem on the page that, together, make this collection a delight for the eye and the ear of the reader.
Woven through the three sections of the book are three variations on a definition of love. The first tells us “it’s all about the traces we leave. the / need for something tangible to hold onto / – love never lasts quite long enough. so / you write it down, take a photograph. / some way of holding it in your memory / because there isn’t any other way of / making you feel quite like you’re really / living….” This is a prose poem with punctuation but no capitalization, where the lines break at margins that make it a single rectangular column in the center of the page — straighter visually than the journey that leads to the last sentence, broken over two lines: “there’s / nothing sadder than a misplaced always” (8). The second variation, in the section called “arithmetic,” takes the same form, though the perfect rectangle is broken by a single word — “balance” — on the last line. In the middle, Holmes writes “it is like being mapped out. she rolls / the taste of me around her tongue. she / is still trying to verify me….” (42). In these poems, mapping the world is a matter for the whole body: “she wants to measure out / the curve of my love. she wants me sugar / frosted, with both sides of my equations / balanced” (42). In the third variation, in “reading,” Holmes writes “how many ways to read ‘see you / soon’? love makes an archaeologist / of you; sifting through dusty heaps / of words to find the fragment that / will make sense of everything….” (79) Sifting through dusty heaps of words, the i of the poem (identified with the poet) is deciphering, then responding to, a letter: “i spent the / next three hours compiling a reply / of similar brevity. this works out as / about an hour per line. i have never / spent that long on a poem. the trouble / with archaeologists is that they have / lost their sense of perspective” (79).
Holmes does not lose hers, and the result is the kind of rootedness one might look for in a nomad at home on the road: “i would not miss what i have in my arms / nor look elsewhere instead of here” (18). Where else? In “the second mrs rochester,” the poet looks out of a new attic workspace at “a row of adolescents” leaning against the railing and text messaging — “one of the kids outside sets fire to the bin in the park / setting off a fever of text messages / a veritable mexican wave of them / they write here i say / looking out of the window…” She turns as “the smoke from the bin is rising / on a level with my attic.” Her back to the fire, she ends “they write here / why shouldn’t I?” (21)
In “the interrelatedness of things” (58), Holmes writes, “give me a lever and / a place to stand / and the universe / will move me.” She does, and it does, and the result is a pleasure. There are some wonderful experiments with shape — like the cup of Pu’er on p.63 — as well as sounds that we can roll on our tongues and insights that move us to new places marked by new perspectives — from “creation myths” in which “it is all mud, and soon / the rains will come” (76); through “new territory,” where “when you are in love / each bus stop raises / a lantern / just for you, and the rain / is always warm” (77); to “movement,” where “sometimes / the ground is / the back of a wet seal” (82); and “language lesson,” where the answer to what words are for is “to find where / a smile leads – / to the edges of ourselves…” (84).
And, finally, in “their rapt faces” (88), “the last line of his book / the middle of someone else’s life” — the last line of this book, in the middle, where we come in, grateful to stumble upon this lovely gathering of poems.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
viki holmes. miss moon’s class. Hong Kong: Chameleon Press, 2008. ISBN 978-988-99565-4-7
