ALEX ebert
"Holm's poetry gushes vitality, pressing the earth itself through her ink. There is a fantastical simplicity in it, rich with all the awe and thanks nature is owed - a great service to those of us too disembodied or too shy to properly thank the earth ourselves."
Eleanor Berry
Author of Green November, No Constant Hues, and Only So Far
Caroline Holm’s Woodland is a rhapsody, a paean to nature’s beauty and power. This poet is passionate both to enter and to ingest the natural world. She yearns “to fall, to fall, to fall / into the all of everything” (“Delivering Woods”). It is not smooth beauty that she finds there but “the imperfect, the impermanent,” “what nature has left rough” (“Creaturehood”). The organization of the poems follows the seasons, and the poet is accepting of the autumn losses that the seasonal cycle brings as well as of its springtime burgeoning. Like Walt Whitman, she finds grandeur in a blade of grass; she senses and celebrates what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “the dearest freshness deep down things.” She doesn’t blame ants for taking over “the best corner of the lawn”: rather, she empathizes with them as fellow creatures who must know “the goodness of lying down, utterly still, half a foot deep / in the thick wildflowers and stocky weeds” (“Ants”). The sensuous experience rendered by the poems of Woodland is enhanced by visual art: each poem is accompanied by a drawing, enriching it as instrumental accompaniment enriches vocals.
KATE GRAY
PNW AUTH0R
“In Woodland, Caroline Holm writes a praise song to wildness. With shifting, diverse rhythms (“Like brick-thick night, all dazed, white light”) and resonant pairings of illustrations and poems, she urges us to exalt in the earth. The poems mark the seasons and invite us “to bask among daisies, to pick the wild herbs/and taste the bitters that the dirt has to offer.” To read this collection is to experience “a common grace…[of] the sacred life and sacred breath that whirl around this earth.”
“In Caroline Holm’s gorgeous new collection of poetry, prose, and evocative art, Woodland, the
natural and human worlds mingle in emotionally accessible, almost mythic ways. From lush to
bare, the landscapes she presents us with are so intertwined with and impacted by our actions
that we realize the two have always been one. Brimming with meditations deep as winter snow
and boundless compassion and curiosity, these vibrant poems remain grounded in a universal
familiarity that opens us up to something greater. If one of the aims of poetry is to condense our
vast, contradictory, and beautiful world into the briefest of songs, Woodland stands as a
testament to its possibility.”
“You will be swept away by Caroline Holm’s poetry, evocative and
passionate, almost old-fashioned in phrasing, but new and fresh at the
same time. Accompanying her words are her lovely nature illustrations
of trees and leaves, flowers, mushrooms, bees and butterflies. Together,
they reveal the depth of her passion for the wild places of our world.
I invite you to set aside some quiet time to savor her words and
drawings, and lose yourself in Wood Land.”
“In Woodland, Caroline Holm deep dives into the Oregon landscape. She excavates our place in it, tracing our veins like vines into the interconnectedness between natural world and our shared humanity; shared between each other perhaps, but shared certainly with the ground, sky, and trees. The verses are beautiful to read with illustrations also by Holm making the book both a wonderful contemplation with words and images. ”
“Caroline Holm’s Woodland is an ever so needed gentle invitation to saunter in the forests, get your bare feet firmly planted in the earth, and heal the wounds left in us by the industries of men. And to quote one of my favorite poems in this book—when you return home, if you are not walking upside down and sideways with mad and wild wonder for the world in which we live—go back out again.”