Nigel Holt

In his 64 Questions, David Holper attempts answers in the form of 27 poems. A short collection of thoughtful — mainly free — verse, 64 Questions calls upon the deity not to denounce him, as the Devil wanted of Job, but to uncover him in his hidden existence, to question and ultimately praise him; to celebrate the God he finds in the everyday and the struggle to come to terms with god therein. This correlation between the divine and the profane, the myth and the minutiae, the unsaid and the invoked, finds its locus in the art of poetry:

what is poetry but a beginning, hand gripped firmly
around the pen

staring off into something so ordinary that no one
sees?

Take our hands now
and help us take our first steps into

what is so familiar
that our steps disappear into whiteness.

(‘Ars Poetica’)

Holper begins assuredly with a knowing apologia to the self-made muse in ‘Invoking the Muse’, a self-referential piece that has the poet shifting the blame for poetic failure elsewhere, while knowing full well where that blame actually lies. He cleverly has the Muse encroach, seemingly unseen in the lyrical close:

           And imagine too, just now as the sky purples,

           she looks up, thinking not at all of you;
           rather, she notices the sky stitched together with

           constellations whose light is arriving
           long after the forms themselves have expired.
 
           (‘Invoking the Muse’)
 
This turning to the muse is picked up in ‘In Media Res’. The action, as the title suggests, begins in the middle of things: ‘Don’t begin in the place where beginners start’. Here Holper talks of poetry in tones redolent of the late R. S.Thomas in his famous ‘To a Young Poet’, but the use of the villanelle suggests another approach to what Thomas pointed out — that ‘her [The Muse’s] proud face is not for you’. The cyclical repetitions in the villanelle point the reader to the conclusion that no matter how we seem to progress, it is illusory and that ultimately no matter how much we refine and revise, we end up back at the beginning.

Likewise, ‘Hamartia’ is an interesting poem that raises the issue of human weakness and divine forgiveness and how that forgiveness, just as much as the caffeine of the author’s addiction, is a social drug of choice that believers need to function effectively:

           before we pour ourselves another cup of something hot
           and sweet

           before we get down on our knees begging for forgiveness.
 
           (‘Hamartia’)

For Holper, we could substitute the Muse or poetry itself as his drug of choice — something that many poets, I’m sure, could identify with. Similarly, although different in its brush, ‘Ars Poetica’ is another poem that deals with poetry. Its evocative use of eastern, ostensibly Japanese, imagery reflects on the poem’s involuntary appearance on the white of the page and the small miracle of that genesis as if it were calligraphy — made in one sweep without removing the brush from the paper. ‘Starting Fires’ similarly reflects on the nature of writing through the degrees of warmth and cold, and again, with hints of a Japanese scene. The essence of writing is, Holper asserts, in the magic of not knowing, in the alchemy of the moment when thought and word meet to create as if with some Philosopher’s stone, the idea made real:

           listening to the ticking of the hot metal,
           closing my eyes,
           wondering
           what magic this day has in store.

           (‘Ars Poetica’)

Also in the same manner, but in a form that reflects more on the western reader, ‘How to be an American Poet’, ironically, is a recipe to be exactly what the American poet is, or as Holper would have us believe. The call is for poets to:

           whisper back
           the new language:
           one in which the shadows
           are unfitted from their forms,             
          
It is in this uncharted realm where the eschewal of materialism is king that the poet should reside, he argues, not here, where:

           the sagging waistline, the wrinkles, the scars,
           the suffering, your voice, the one you thought
           sang these cold stars into words  
             
And again, it’s here that Holper finds the divine, hiding between the margins of the words, a god that talks back and ‘whispers your true name’.

This is the heart of 64 Questions: not the poems that self-referentially assert themselves as essays on the poetic oeuvre, but essentially philosophical discursions on existence itself, with both humanity’s and the poet’s place within that world. ‘Doppelganger’ is a poem that reflects the general concern of the book in that it reflects the deeper malaise of the human condition with its striking imagery. It has the reader thinking of Tolkien’s hypnotic Dead Marshes with its drowned legions of malevolent spirits when he recalls the faces in the ice, so incongruous as it is with the Christian Hell. Holper’s use of imagery is effective here, as it is in many other places in the book; and while perhaps the content is discursive, the effect is often very visual:

           Dante glances down and notices figures frozen below,
           sinners looking at up him in agony
           perpetually frozen, endlessly waiting for nothing
           except more of the same

           (‘Doppelganger’)

This is the central notion of the book: the eponymous 64 Questions and the Book of Job — Job the ancient paragon of patience, whose main task it seems is to posit that what we actually know as people is limited to that very humanity that defines us. Therefore, the conundrum of unknown sin that Job faces (he believes that he is both innocent and at the same time potentially guilty) is mirrored in the paradoxical desire for divine forgiveness that perhaps we actually don’t want to hear, because we don’t want to know that we are actually wrong. The knowing might just be too much for anyone to actually bear. It’s hard to second-guess an omnipotent being.

           Nor have you comforted the grieving

           or even been honest enough to say
           these things. But as they resonate

           now, what you wouldn’t give to
           bow at another’s feet

           lower them into the water,
           and wash away the stain of

           all that desire has fooled you
           into being.
 
           (‘64 Questions’)

In ‘Injustice’, it is just this contradiction that makes the nature of perceived injustice and forgiveness difficult, and ultimately at the centre of a thinking believer’s dilemma over the obeying of the ego set against the blind acceptance of God’s will. In the end, Holper, it seems, turns to an acceptance of unconditional love, given through Joseph’s forgiveness of his brother’s crimes.

           a blessing
           that transcends even the length of memory.
 
           (‘Injustice’)
 
Almost at a tangent with this idea, is Holper’s discursion on Eternal Return. In ‘Re(vision)’, the premise is that we have the desire for the Es Muss Sein in Beethoven’s working of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return: the ability to be able to return to the scene de crime of a past failure and use that piece of backstairs repartee; that wonderful wit we dreamt up twenty minutes too late after the humiliation we suffered at the hands of a classmate in school; to reverse all the silly and hurtful things we once said and have lived with guiltily every time our memory revisits them; the imagined revenge — who of us hasn’t been there?

           …sailing on just past the iceberg
           of our own foolishness.

         (‘Re(vision)’)
 
‘Noise’ is related, but perhaps less important in that it is an investigation of the ego, of doubt; but like Job it is an attempt to explain the perceived wrongs that go on around us: a prayer to strengthen resolve in the face of such apparent evil that is left unchecked, and as ‘Hinges’ works in the same manner, by looking at the roots of the divine in acts rather than prayer — a rather Jamesian approach, which seems to typify Holper’s more actively muscular philosophy in 64 Questions as a whole:

           In thinking of this story
           I am always struck by how much hinges
           On the way we not only see one another
           but act upon it.
           For if not in us,
           where else should the divine take root?

           (‘Hinges’)
 
‘Caesura’ conjures up a grammatical reference that one would, perhaps, expect from a lecturer observing a student in a café. This meditation is rich in sense information but has the spell broken by the bird flying into the room. One can’t help think of Bede’s motif of the sparrow used in the conversion of  Edwin, King of Northumbria — how man’s life is like the sparrow’s flight through the lit hall — before it, and after it, is darkness and therefore unknown:

           And then the bird takes flight — disappears out
           another door
 
           (‘Caesura’)

This kind of idea — through allusion and metaphor — lies at the heart of 64 Questions: the discovery of divine meaning in the mundane activities of everyday, even though Holper’s methods of reaching there are eclectic.

The Anglo-Saxon reappears in ‘The Six Things a River Might Say if it Were to Speak’ in that the six pieces exhibit a tone redolent of Anglo-Saxon riddles, but in reverse. The river’s gnomic utterances are knowing ones, and again reflect on the interaction of the divine and the profane:

           VI)

           In the end, you come to me for the same reason
           the salmon do:
           God tips you back into yourself when you seek Him.
           Anyone who leans too far out over the water to see
           himself must finally fall through into the depths
           for an answer.
            
           (‘The Six Things a River Might Say if it Were to Speak’)

Once more unto grammar, ‘The Comma’s Complaint’ has a touch of ‘Innisfree’ in its light-hearted and semi-jokey wish to arise and go:
 
           to meet a semi colon I am fond of,

           (‘The Comma’s Complaint’)

Yet while it superficially reflects the college lecturer’s despair at undergraduate illiteracy, with its resignation of unfulfilled sexual desire made metaphor that recalls ‘Prufrock’, a deep spiritual malaise that we ‘do not examine the small print’ raises its head — a criticism that could be laid at the door of humanity in so many ways, perhaps.

This moral laxity asserts itself again in ‘Subjectivity’ — an essay on the human condition that has as its metaphor the trench — apt, given its WWI uses and the inexcusable blindness that we excuse in ourselves. I wonder if Holper believes that, lacking the perspective of the deity, we can be forgiven our blindness? That is not necessarily obvious, perhaps.

‘Tying Shoelaces’ is a similar act of penance in the ordinary motions of the day that elicit contrition — even though not in themselves particularly religious — such as tying a child’s shoelaces and receiving a smile in return:

           and in this simple brightening grace,
           we are both set free
           to run the race
           set before us.

           (‘Tying Shoelaces’)

There is redemption in this small act that Holper seems to assert is as spiritual as any prayer; a surrender to Divine Grace in smallest manifestations
 
‘Breastbone’, however, deals with ‘death up close’ and dealing with death as a child. The most striking image in this is perhaps the final one where the subtle use of blue and white earlier in the poem is beautifully contrasted with the imagined red of a rose, that appears almost like the red rose in the photo-shopped black and white photograph. Surprisingly perhaps, death does appear as an end in 64 Questions. Perhaps this is faint-heart being allowed ‘an outpouring/ Death appears in Graveside’. With a careful build up of grey in image the final scene invokes the strong emotion through colour, as is the case in ‘Breastbone’. What is most curious about this poem is that is the one with least questions, least belief, and no mention of God. It is a poem devoid of answers because the question dare not be phrased:

           Could I be wrong?

           the deeper thing,

           for which words will necessarily fail;
           your turn to stand at the edge
           of everything
           that you would just this moment
           gladly give up
           just to know where
           she abides
            
           (‘Graveside’)
 
As a final note, the poems ‘Ethnicity’ and ‘Weltschmerz’ deal with the boxing of humanity in untidy boxes, perhaps less successfully than elsewhere and whose metaphor also lies at the heart of some of the other poems — especially the faint-heart that lies in three of the final four less well-realised (and longer) poems of the book: ‘Knowing’, ‘A Meditation’ and ‘Litany’.

A word on ‘A Sonnet for Jacob’: this sees Holper experimenting (somewhat inexpertly) in form that does not reinforce the message as effectively as he does in his freer pieces or the slightly better structured villanelle ‘In Media Res’. Holper seems a writer who feels more comfortable playing in the wider spaces of Vers Libre.

That said, the whole experience of 64 Questions and its philosophical thrust is one that leaves one with many more thoughts and questions unanswered, and the pleasure of having read some beautiful phrasing and imagery in many of the poems. Overall, 64 Questions is a book that repays revisits not only to contemplate the wider issues it raises.