Brett Rutherford

The Barbara Holland Reader Brett Rutherford

Created as a one-volume introduction to the poetry of Barbara A. Holland (1925-1988), the mysterious Greenwich Village poet who was a centerpiece of the 1970s neo-romantic and Gothic poetry movement, this volume presents all the reviews and essays about Holland that appeared in her lifetime, along with the poems quoted or cited in those articles. This makes it a perfect book to study and teach the remarkable work of this 20th-century American poet. Twenty-eight of Holland's most memorable writings are here, including the terrifying "Medusa," "Black Sabbath," and "Apples of Sodom and Gomorrah." Her work is garlanded with a group of poems about her by her contemporaries and by younger poets she influenced, including Shirley Powell, D. H. Melhem, Marjorie DeFazio, Dan Wilcox, and Vincent Spina. A memoir of Holland in her coffeehouse haunts by Matthew Paris establishes her image and milieu as a fixture of the last Bohemia of Manhattan. Interviews, reviews and essays about Holland are presented here for their first time since their appearance almost four decades ago. Those who shed light on Holland's unique place in American poetry include Olga Cabral, Stephen-Paul Martin, Maurice Kenny, A. D. Sullivan, Robert Kramer, Ivan Argüelles, Kirby Congdon, Claudia Dikinis, and Michael Redmond. Since Holland's more than 800 extant poems are scattered across numerous chapbooks and books, this volume includes a complete bibliography of the currently-known poems. This is the ninth and final volume of a series based on the Barbara A. Holland Papers, and the archives of The Poet's Press.