Earthbound

Steve Holt

Earthbound

These orange clay fields on the valley bluffs
used to yield corn for cattle. Here
they choke in the doldrums

of rogue growth longstemmed and rustling
all about, unnerving as the past. Dark
as conscience the profound river mumbles
through a violet bruise of gloaming.

A little hound appears from a path
she has torn through the weeds, wet
grass rinsing her long ears. She runs low,
drawn to the magnet earth, immersed
in bloodscent anew, her tail in allegro thrum.

Under a stunted apple tree, bonegnarled
and fruitless, I lean back
and consider the first cold
star of evening, how unfathomable
it is to me. Now far off
the dog sounds deep pleasure with the chase.

ISBN 1-59661-147-2
48 pages/$12

Stephen Holt’s poetry moves along the old field path at dusk, crooning the cradle-to-grave tones of that cherished native home. The people and places living inside his pastoral lyric emerge distinctively, with the force of a primary experience that we just cannot remember any other way.
--Sherry Stanforth

In Earthbound, Steve Holt engages the struggle of life in highly charged language, buckling and hawsing, brought to bear on the business of securing and naming experience. His poetry sings of survivors, the dead, mine explosions, that gone girl on the old Virginia coast. The land and its lives are lost and regained here and we hear it all in a tough, melodious music dense and textured as earth.
--Richard Hague

These poems range widely in time and geography, but all show the mark of a mature writer whose language and insights make Earthbound a wonderful collection of poetry.
--Ron Rash

A native of northeastern Kentucky, Steve Holt is the author of three previous poetry collections: Late Mowing (2000), Elegy for September (2007), and A Tone Poem of Stones (2008). During the past decade Holt has given readings and led poetry workshops throughout much of the Upper South.