‘Table for One’ Is a Feast
In his new book of pandemic-era poems, whether he’s describing dolomite stones bedded together or pouring bits of bone and ash upon the waters, releasing his father, David Holper reaches deep within to give us rich and harshly beautiful poetry.
The Eureka poet and teacher reflects that while politicians denied America’s racism, we watched Breonna Taylor dying in her bed, shot by White police officers, and George Floyd dying on the street, a White knee on his neck for 9 minutes, 29 seconds — no connection to the color of his skin.
He says that we’re told that genocide of Native Americans was a fluke and that no one here in the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave would stoop so low as to hate someone for the amount of melanin in their skin. That must be some other country “where no Black or Brown person has to fear for their life every time a cop pulls them over for absolutely nothing.”
In “Bord för En” (Swedish for “Table for One”), Holper — Eureka’s inaugural poet laureate, 2019-2021 — writes of the COVID pandemic, when those who claimed the right to go unmasked and unvaccinated “barged in, as if they were packing heat, asked for every freedom in the till, robbed the rest of us blind,” killing so many for absolutely nothing. Matching that arrogance and ignorance is Holper’s cry that “oil, gas, coal extraction means nothing” while the planet dies “from all we’ve failed to connect right under our noses.”
Yet he celebrates the Klamath River running wild again, reveling to stand at the base of Hyperion, and in Spain’s flat plains of great abundance, where his heart “awakens in the whispering spirit.” He wonders “what it will feel like when the wind lifts you above the past, and love blesses everything from horizon to horizon.” Holper reaches inside himself and humanity to try to find hope amidst despair, “transforming us all in moonlight.”
He learns from his wife that “love is bigger than all that, bigger than the broken self I look at in the mirror, the one I had learned to hate because after all, isn’t that the inheritance my parents offered me?” She taught him that “love is fluent in every language, knows where it is wanted, which is, after all, everywhere.”
Ultimately, Holper asks, what good will a poem do? I answer that it opens us to the deep pain and rare moments of joy that it is to be human.
Michele Francesconi lives in Trinidad.
David Holper’s fourth book of poetry, “Bord för En,” was published in September. Visit davidholper.com/.
