Brad Leithauser

  It feels so much Like waking, this Rising after Forty minutes Under forty Feet of water; And to fill your Life-vest, breath by Breath, while floating Nearer a moon Mounted just high Enough to have Lost all trace of Gold and have turned A cool silver Is seemingly To come at once Greatly before The drawing source Of every blood-   Tide sleeplessness.

  For where,...

Late afternoon light, and such a pretty touch – the way the sun, slow- wheeling down the wall in a fall of white on white, clear into gold explodes just upon reaching the bowl of elaborate, illicit fireworks reserved for this evening’s party.

Not until the night has grown into its own at last, drinks downed, dinner in all its courses done, and the guests, trailing bright...

Two poets, writing in nearly the same language (British English, American English) and born at nearly the same time (1952, 1951). One, Andrew Motion, is quite well-known in this country, though an unfamiliar name to most readers of verse in America. The other, Nicholas Christopher, is one of the most celebrated of America’s younger poets but – I suspect – an unknown figure in England, at least as a poet (his novel, The Soloist, was published by Pan last year). In each case, this disparity in reputation – this failure, or at least delay, in the gaining of a transatlantic reputation – would seem, on the face of it, rather mysterious, since each is an accessible and rewarding writer. Any explanation of the mystery probably must begin with the distressing lack of literary interchange between the two countries at present – a lack far more pronounced with poetry than with fiction. Two poets, then, sharing language, youth, and a broadening ocean.’

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.