Hills Full of Holes

"Birdcall a doorlatch," this book begins, and we enter into a world of "forest bathing" on trails of the East Bay Area parklands, undertaken while recuperating from a brain injury. This is a refractory world of senses heightened and disrupted: a world of suns blaring, finger-leaves falling, huge beetles glistening, train-horns blendering the sky.

But Alter's third collection goes beyond a document of senses askew in the woods. "Whose woods," the poems ask, searching out multiple layers of the landscape in time and space. Texts drawn from first European encounters are pressured in a series of erasures; lyrics investigate the pressures put on the land and its original inhabitants. These include poems of a redwood forest clear-cut twice, a refinery dominating the skyline, and one tracing a creek on its course through parkland and city, dammed into lakes, culverted under mini-malls, until it drains into the bay at the foot of that refinery. Part elegy, part pastoral, part ode to beloved and beleaguered set-asides, Hills Full of Holes journeys in widening understandings of injuries to body and land, and their possible recoveries.