Description
Book SynopsisAttachment to the familiar and the challenge of leaving it for new horizons link the poems in this collection by Margaret Holley. The poems are full of feeling and wisdom in equal parts, and are enriched and informed by the poet's landscape, whether it is Switzerland or Arizona. The landscape, in fact, becomes a kind of mirror we gaze into to see the future that at every turn is approaching and moving through us to illuminate the past. The journey of this book shows how the conditions of our lives are illumined by our cultural forbears—Goethe, Chopin, Nietzsche, Bonnard, Klee—by the heritage of personal memory, and by the ever amazing "book of nature." A book remarkable for the complete authenticity of its feeling and candor, Walking Through the Horizon shows us the simultaneity of the past and the future and is grounds for hopefulness and joy: "These are gifts worth passing on: / the beckoning vista, the sudden frontier, / the rivers of days and years to come."
Trade ReviewHolley deserves a wider audience."— Mary Oliver, author of
Why I Wake Early"Margaret Holley's new poems seem to partake both of the leaf-shadow of the old Northeast and of the stunned sunlight of the new Southwest. The scars of ordinary human experience are everywhere apparent, but are ameliorated by the balance and temperance of her language. Holley's westward migration, in
Walking Through the Horizon, is a quintessentially American passage out of childhood and into adulthood." — Karl Kirchwey, author of
The Engrafted Word and
At the Palace of Jove
