Familiar at First, Then Strange

Familiar at First, Then Strange, Meredith Holmes' first full-length book, introduces readers to a voice in which intellect and image vie for position, a voice of constant surprises, of startling honesty and intensity. The voice is rooted in nature, in the "vaulted bones" of trees. "I was fostered by an American Sycamore," she tells us. She "body surfs a blue biography of Luther Burbank," as "locusts harmonize in the tulip trees." We learn of a double life: "the tone and timbre / of everything flowed through me." Holmes pulls the quotidian down to the mysteries that silence holds. Ancestered by New England, nurtured by a small town in the East, the poet found herself in a city "soaked in immigrant grief." There, in Cleveland, she forged poems into an American voice of scope and originality. And, it must be said, of great beauty.