At the heart of Hermina Burns’ seventh poetry collection is the presence and mystery of ‘messy, soft-mouthed love’ and its connections to place, weather, and landscape. The poems confront the difficulty of knowing what love is.
As critic Jennifer Gribble explains, “holding on proves a rich metaphor in these beautifully crafted poems: ‘explosive covenants of love’ that question and celebrate what memory can hold and be held by. With sensuous immediacy, Hermina Burns locates in the domestic and the daily, in landscape and seascape, the sounds and sights and rhythms that link personal stories with the larger history of our time and place.”