Material Matters

Tom Holmes is an impresario of dreams. His images form a compendium at the same time personal and archetypal, incidental and enduring. Pablo Neruda’s dictum, We are many is richly borne out in these virtuoso poems, where Somewhere in the deepest library, / a copyist begins retranslating / the last straight inch of history ; where all treasure maps / are stolen, memorized, and eaten. What remains, this book proves, is poetry in its spontaneity, magically perpetual. - Angela Ball, author of Talking Pillow and Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds

Sometimes I draw a boundless world, a mapmaker asserts in Tom Holmes’s Material Matters, a notable new collection of poems seeped in the materiality of maps and books and letters, of vellum and ink, of copyists and cartographers and compass chickens. The fascinating boundless world of this collection encompasses the wind and stars and god and meditates on the everyday sustenance of pen and bread. Like the cartographer, who believed in grounding observation, Holmes charts the world through particulars, using a sure hand to build to a stunning long poem that maps both love and loss.

• Rebecca Morgan Frank, author of Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country and The Spokes of Venus

Set aside the old admonition that the map is not the territory, this is. From the unique vantage of a mapmaker floating godlike above his subject, cartography creates the world, as true for the earliest charts on vellum as for the intimate topographies of these smart and informed poems. Tom Holmes is a cartographer of authentic imagination, of history and deep longing, Pangea to Beatrice, Archimedes to Mississippi.

• Allan Peterson, author of Fragile Acts and Precarious