NEW FROM SALT
ANSELM HOLLO
Braided River
Salt Modern Poets
ISBN 1-84471-109-9
GBP 12.99 USD 19.99
Braided River is a selection from forty years of published poems plus some
of my most recent, uncollected work. It describes a lifetime’s endeavours
to write poems that reflect a thinking and feeling person’s
twentieth century existence in Europe and America - in love and sorrow, and
even, still, some hope for the future of the world at large.
“This is a man who sees through to the other side of empire’s lies, but who
is also capable of remaining perfectly still, a rare thing, as Pascal knew.
He doesn’t bother with spending the entire day in search of the
<em>mot juste</em>, as Ford said of Conrad. He's got a million
of them up his sleeve. You want mot juste? “Lookee here,” as Buddy Guy says
before he rips into one of his solos: “In the land of invisible warfare,
many thoughts return marked insufficient postage.”” --PATRICK PRITCHETT
“Anselm Hollo wrote The Empress Hotel Poems (there were six of them), which
appeared in Jon Silkin’s magazine, Stand, in England, in 1966. I was
astounded by them then, for they proposed, for the first time in my
experience, that it was possible for an American poetic idiom to be adopted
by a European (writing in English). It is impossible for someone under 40
(say) writing poetry in America today to imagine the narrowness of
possibility allowed by the literary climate in England at that time. There
were some British poets (Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood being the outstanding
examples) who had the nous to overcome those severe limits, but for me, and
I’m sure for many others, it was Anselm Hollo’s work that represented a
crucial breakthrough, especially because Stand was a magazine with a
relatively large distribution, while Raworth and Harwood were still
“underground” poets at that time. What The Empress Hotel Poems illuminated
was the simple fact that Kerouac, Ginsberg, O’Hara and company, were not
simply icons of a seemingly fabulous culture beyond our reach, but were
potential models for the future of a new poetics.” --DOUG LANG
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