6X9 In, 88 Pp < "Sister Betty Reads The Whole You < Carries The Fever of Moments Besieged < By Other Moments. Intensely Awake, < Quick As The Neck of A Bird Looking From < Side To Side, Susan Holahan's Poems < Have Absorbed The Emotional Cast That < Things Pick Up From Use and The Emotions < of People Who Are Pulled A Thousand < Ways At Once. Her Book Is A True < Portrait--Ardent, Political, and < Familial: The Whole You. "--Marvin Bell. < Winner of The 1997 Pergrine Smith < Poetry Competition.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
With reportage at once cranky and lush, Holahan takes on single motherhood and family, class and the classics, rendering our impulsive approaches to each other: "What a tiny baby! yells a ruffled woman./ Tiny baby! she screams halfway here, Baby!" Her debut tracks Eurydice's vanishing and traces "Paper Hats Like Sailors' Caps" on the heads of women walking together, "trading work-hell stories." Holahan's remembrances of postwar childhood, late Vietnam-era child rearing and lefty political protest often come through in a difficult, sometimes crabbed syntax, but one that seems apt given some of the surroundings and situations she describes: a down-and-out New Haven; widowhood; friends who have died, the poet Jane Kenyon among them. But the lighter moments--"Your mint" sniffs someone who sounds like the poet's mother, surveying the poet's garden, "has eaten the little tulips"--more than counterbalance the shadows. The brilliant "History of Food" links the Rosenbergs, co-op day care and quips like "Take-out firms mushroomed before anyone could spell/ Chernobyl." Fierce, funny and unforgiving, this mature first outing is also intimate and, finally, loving: "My sun/ has returned with crushed, soaked weeds and/ flowerheads more brown than fulvous yellow./ I don't know/ what else I can ask from this life."
Copyright 1998 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From the Back Cover
"Sister Betty Read the Whole You carries the fever of moments besieged by other moments. Intensely awake, quick as the neck of a bird looking from side to side, Susan Holahan's poems have absorbed the emotional cast that things pick up from use and the emotions of people who are pulled a thousand ways at once. Her book is a true portrait--ardent, political and familial: the whole you." --Marvin Bell
"These wonderful poems are outraged at the world's sorrow but don't claim to matter more than the suffering they grieve over. Cherishing words and sounds, they are experienced in the mouth. Susan Holahan takes a kind, sharp-eyed interest in the way we all grow old, as if we were so many cracked but handsome china cups. These poems make sense in the manner of junk shops or button boxes, or the several simultaneous conversations of longtime friends."
--Alice Mattison, author of Men Giving Money, Women Yelling
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