Narrow Places

Brad Leithauser

• Selected Poems by Molly Holden
  Carcanet, 126 pp, £6.95, June 1987, ISBN 0 85635 696 4
• The Player Queen’s Wife by Oliver Reynolds
  Faber, 78 pp, £8.95, November 1987, ISBN 0 571 14998 7
• The Consuming Myth: The Work of James Merrill by Stephen Yenser
  Harvard, 367 pp, £21.95, June 1987, ISBN 0 674 16615 9

In ‘Barn Roof’, one of her earliest poems, Molly Holden speaks of ‘quarried colours’. The phrase says much about both her artistic ambitions, which strove endlessly after fresh visual detail, and her poetic methods, which often relied upon boldly proximate alliteration and what might be called off-off-rhyme. In the best of her poems, many of which were written at the outset of her career, a keen eye for the natural world conjoins with an ear subtly attuned to internal modulations; her most interesting aural effects often arise not in her end-rhymes but within the individual line. ‘Barn Roof’ also gives us the phrase, ‘runnels of rain-stains sustaining the decorative features ...’ That daring near-stammer of ‘stains sustaining’ strikes the sort of clangorous note one might expect to find in a poem that strives after grandeur; one of the pleasures of Holden’s work is the incongruous way in which she brings a dense, brazen music to poems that might well be described as miniatures.