Scan barcode
lawrence_retold's review
4.0
I read Story the Flowers for the first time quickly, too quickly, not even fully appreciating it, and then turned around and gave it four stars anyway, almost on faith, as the only printed collection of poetry by the lyrical collaborator on a pair of incredible albums by [a:Brian Eno|1195|Brian Eno|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] and Old Man Diode. Since then, I've been carrying the book around in a tiny pocket (in which I sometimes confuse it with my passport), and have made a habit of dipping into it whenever I have just a few minutes and need a poetic recharge. For some reason, the complex rhythms, internal rhymes and assonance of Holland's poetry have been coming forward to me much more strongly on reread. Like the best lyrics, I suppose, the poems in Story the Flowers grow stronger from multiple exposures.
Some of Holland's preoccupations were clear already from the Eno collaboration, Drums Between the Bells: like Eno himself, for example, Holland is a "systems thinker", and loves to write about such themes as networks and cosmic order (of the scientific, rather than mystical, kind). We read, for example, of "the stars, / that light specked blanket which / lies above a one brain world" in the book's second poem, "One Brain City", whose title may or may not be an anagrammatical tribute to Brian Eno. What I didn't expect here were poems on a more personal scale, but they're here too: poems about drinking, lots of poems about riding trains. "Four pints of Guinness, and the moon / looks like a fish's eyeball", Holland writes in "Dorset Moon". It almost reads like an unintended confession, actually.
I was reading a lot of [a:G.K. Chesterton|7014283|G.K. Chesterton|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1365860649p2/7014283.jpg]'s poetry at the time I first read through Story the Flowers, and found Holland and Chesterton to be nice foils for each other. Both excellent poets dealing, often, in universals, the positions they take couldn't be more different: Holland welcomes the vision of a science-based, emergent superhuman order that Chesterton decries. The poems in Story the Flowers have the motor of a complex machine themselves, and are very welcome to it. The feeling I often get from Story the Flowers is one of coolly detaching yourself from human affairs for a while -- "Train crowd (Victoria to Battersea)", for example, begins, "Skeletons, skulls, bone domes, / with cow-hide drum skins" -- and, there's often such an attraction in that for me, whether the detachment is interpreted as being "above" or simply "other than". Where Chesterton attempts to get at the heart of humanity through his discourse on God, Holland talks about humans -- including, at times, himself -- and ends up emphasizing all of our alienness anyway.
Some of Holland's preoccupations were clear already from the Eno collaboration, Drums Between the Bells: like Eno himself, for example, Holland is a "systems thinker", and loves to write about such themes as networks and cosmic order (of the scientific, rather than mystical, kind). We read, for example, of "the stars, / that light specked blanket which / lies above a one brain world" in the book's second poem, "One Brain City", whose title may or may not be an anagrammatical tribute to Brian Eno. What I didn't expect here were poems on a more personal scale, but they're here too: poems about drinking, lots of poems about riding trains. "Four pints of Guinness, and the moon / looks like a fish's eyeball", Holland writes in "Dorset Moon". It almost reads like an unintended confession, actually.
I was reading a lot of [a:G.K. Chesterton|7014283|G.K. Chesterton|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1365860649p2/7014283.jpg]'s poetry at the time I first read through Story the Flowers, and found Holland and Chesterton to be nice foils for each other. Both excellent poets dealing, often, in universals, the positions they take couldn't be more different: Holland welcomes the vision of a science-based, emergent superhuman order that Chesterton decries. The poems in Story the Flowers have the motor of a complex machine themselves, and are very welcome to it. The feeling I often get from Story the Flowers is one of coolly detaching yourself from human affairs for a while -- "Train crowd (Victoria to Battersea)", for example, begins, "Skeletons, skulls, bone domes, / with cow-hide drum skins" -- and, there's often such an attraction in that for me, whether the detachment is interpreted as being "above" or simply "other than". Where Chesterton attempts to get at the heart of humanity through his discourse on God, Holland talks about humans -- including, at times, himself -- and ends up emphasizing all of our alienness anyway.
More...