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Holding Company: Poems
 
 
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Holding Company: Poems [Hardcover]

Major Jackson (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Book Description

August 23, 2010

“Major Jackson makes poems that rumble and rock.”—Dorianne Laux

In Holding Company, Major Jackson explores art, literature, and music as a kingdom, or an empire, a dark, seductive force in our lives. In an effort to understand desire, beauty, and love as transient anodynes to metaphysical loneliness, he invokes Constantine Cavafy, Pablo Neruda, Anna Akhmatova, and Dante Rossetti.

from “Jewel-Tongued”
   The stillness of a lover’s mouth
   assaulted me. I never wearied of anecdotes
   on the Commons, gesturing until I scattered
   myself into a luminance, shining over a city
   of women. Was I less human or more? I hear still
   my breathing echoing off their pillows. So many
   eyes like crushed flowers. Our fingers splayed
   over a bed’s edge. We were blown away.

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Holding Company: Poems + Leaving Saturn (The Cave Canem Poetry Prize) + Hoops: Poems
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In his third collection, which is also his darkest, Jackson (Hoops) delves into wrenching, personal subject matter in rigid 10-line poems, a formal choice that seems to inspire an emotional nakedness he hasn't previously achieved. He begins on a visionary note--"For I, too, desired the Lion's mouth split/ & the world that is not ours, and the wounded children/ set free"--and then, in the same poem, name-checks Duke Ellington: these poems range widely across various registers and subjects, from the timeless and mythic to pop culture. But at the core of all of them is an awareness of the dark beneath everyday goings-on: "The neighbors/ know your comings and goings, but the syntax/ of your smiles is revealed only to little children." Also at the heart of these poems is the painful dissolution of a marriage, which Jackson compares to "a democracy lost to a monarchy." This leads, in a poem called "Therapy," to "Ashes of fire in his mouth, rain sloshed in/ his head" and to a life with "Stray dogs for company." Yet, there's resolution, a new love: "I am learning/ the steps of a foreign song." This powerful book represents a painful but inspired journey.
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Review

“Starred Review: This powerful book represents a painful but inspired journey.” (Publishers Weekly )

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 91 pages
  • Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (August 23, 2010)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0393070808
  • ISBN-13: 978-0393070804
  • Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #987,322 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4.0 out of 5 stars a major romance, September 13, 2011
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Holding Company: Poems (Hardcover)
the voice of a melancholic who must have the last word, silencing his listeners so his listeners can feel what he feels, major jackson is at home writing of lost love.

Digging Holes

Consider this effervescing body a topiary,

greeting visitors at the edge of a college town,

or rather, grief disguised as feigned joy

flitting in and out of rhododendron

and lilac bushes. What I mean: twilight

in the backyard, explaining the women

away as nothing more than gray drifts

of clouds. Consider those echoes of passion

that rippled toward the bleak snowfields of my days

as slips on the ice when the globe arced.

in ceasing to care he forces a common sympathy which falls far short of the empathic and settles instead on the pathetic, the pathetic of pathos.

Thinking of Lucretius

I follow her to the floor of a canvas,

to bonfires at daybreak, to highways of scenic

strangeness, to calla lilies alive in courtyards of pain,

past fathers marching in mud, silence, and rain,

to battlefields and fissures in earth, beyond

baroque facades and that rapt spell of widening voices

arguing with the sea. Then, and only then, do our shadows

commence their deep communion, and a summer evening

of stars yawns its bare shimmering. We stare down

the arson in us with a ceiling fan turning above.

not without beauty, but bookish. the voice of a poet who has found a home within the castles of the university, and what he has brought inside with him of personal past and historical past are feelings. and on the underpinnings of feelings and his past rest his poetry built up on ten lines of short sentences like patterns in a book of samples from the house of pound and pound's advice to learn form from poems written in foreign languages. jackson does just that. to jackson poetry is foreign country, beautiful scenery and historical ruins reminding him of his own past.

more than 80 poems in a singular form, some lines and section titles recycled and used more than once in other poems, make the collection of poems, on a second glance, more tightly knit than at first sight. all so very romantic.
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