Viki Holmes

I immediately loved Viki Holmes' poem "Threshold Guardians" from The Four Quarters here, in the August 2013 issue. She has an amazing sense of time, history and place--I immediately thought of my time in Spain, down to the details. She has the lyrical sense of Borges as well, and is so talented.

Here's an excerpt:

There are those who read
from books old as stones
borders of old countries
sweet as sugared almonds
pages layered in temple dust:
lips pursed to blow,
to reveal instructions in the cool stone.
Others return, not quite satisfied. [...]

Her poem "Variantions on a Theme" here was also neat, I loved the opening especially, but it's a great fugue style style of remixing all the elements to express life and its limits and repetitiveness:

(andante)

and remembering that I have already talked of oystercatchers, that the first glint of the sun too has been referenced, even the cross-hatching of a sunburnt shoulder has been mentioned on more than one occasion, all of these things and still I wish somehow to talk of love without talking of love. I want to explain that even small things like oystercatchers and sunburn are shot through with you, that I am agape with the world most days. things don’t seem separate, in particular, and it is harder then to see you & I as being separate either. distance doesn’t matter, it is an academic thing, a hypothetical. my sun sets as yours rises, or close enough, so that one of us is always eyes closed, dreaming of the other and this means that there is not ever a time when one of us is not thinking of elsewhere. and so  there is no elsewhere… [...]