Elegy for September
Stephen M. Holt
With Foreword by Kathryn Stripling Byer
Elegy for September
My first recollection of death, vague
and indelible, hangs far back
in the wall press of my mind, back
between Bobby Thomson’s homer
and Willie Mays’ catch, when
the sharp sky of autumn shone
sheer as a barn’s metal roof.
An old drunk drifting home late sings,
You’ve got to walk that lonesome valley.
A coffin stands centerpiece
in a flower-trimmed front room.
I hear weeping
through open windows, smell the dark
of coffee grounds from the kitchen.
isbn 1-59661-062-X
59 pages/$9
vivid as photographs…
In the idiom of today Stephen Holt evokes a world going and long gone. These poems are as vivid as photographs, as stark at times as Walker Evans, as warm as Doris Ulmann. Holt invites us into his own special Appalachian world of work and family, vision and memory, with historic depth, yet immediate and intimate as this morning.
—Robert Morgan
Author of Gap Creek
and The Strange Attractor:
New and Selected Poems
…deft, resonant,
thick as blood…
Stephen Holt is an elegist of field and hollow, a prober of the past from the Paint Creek of the Shawnee to the Eastern coalfields in a series fo successful skirmishes with time and place. He makes poems that are deft and resonant, “thick as blood and slow as history.”
—Richard Taylor
…immediate,
intimate
as this morning…
Elegy for September
Stephen M. Holt
$9.00USD
March Street Press
3413 Wilshire
Greensboro NC
marchstreetpress.com
rbixby@earthlink.net
isbn 1-59661-062-X