The Hills of Holland, and: Slow Risen Among the Smoke Trees (review)

The Hills of Holland is Esther Schor's first collection, and it is an auspicious beginning. Her work has appeared widely in periodical journals, but the format of the full-length book shows to a real advantage the richly textured and interrelated nature of Schor's poetry. Not just the long, multi-part poem that lends the collection its title, but also the intriguing, tight sequence of eight poems sub-titled "Cumbria" set up an ongoing dialogue with one another and with the poems in the first two sections of this four-section collection. That the poems have a strong academic flavor undoubtedly reflects Schor's own professional situation, but that flavor also reflects the careful layering of materials in the poems themselves. The most conspicuous example of this layering comes in a catalogue poem called "Two Foods I Hate," which consists of a dozen lines of nouns related to one another in no apparent way save for their lively sonic interplay ("Chisel, balloon, osprey, / Ode, curio, foolscap, parch . . . ," p. 46) and concluding with what the title predicts: "Limes and lima beans."

This sort of sonic playfulness forms one important element of Schor's poems; they have a sure ear and an eclectic voice; over and over we are surprised (even delighted) by unexpected juxtapositions of sound, image, and suggestion. Thus in a particularly deft poem in the "Cumbria" section, we learn about a calf named Buster whose mother and siblings all bore names starting with "B." Thus personalized, Buster is remembered for the kindly feedings by the boys who knew him – especially Nicholas, who "gave him his feeds / looked after him, groomed him / with the dog's brush. Had games with him–" ("Helen on Buster," p.55). This seemingly calf-pet is then "sent off" at the age of two "to a man near Darley / down the A31, who sent him back / in steaks and mince. And was he tasty! and tender!" (p. 55). This contemporary account of living off the Cumbrian land is juxtaposed in these eight poems with the experiences of earlier Cumbrians like the Wordsworths, William and Dorothy, in an extended, witty, and poignant mediation on past and present by a scholarly poet with an obviously deep reverence for the past – even if it is a past that comes only at third or fourth hand, in fragments rather than entire, and in occasionally incongruous juxtapositions. The textured, layered, catalogued nature of Schor's poems are perhaps best illustrated by a sonnet from "Cumbria," which demonstrates the stylistic and linguistic features that characterize the poems generally:

Edinburgh: The Scottish National War Memorial

Just beyond the Castle barracks, cobbles
round a parapet commanding views
east to Holyrood and black St. Giles;
north, Scott's spindle looks about to topple.
Inside the apse, a granite frieze of thistle,
the Highlanders' Sans Peur and the Royal Navy
cenotaph: They have no other grave than the sea.
A bust of Captain MacConnachie, killed by a missile

at Ypres, hushes the boom of the one o'clock gun.
You'd leave but for the names: Dardanelles, Loos,
Gallipoli, Gibraltar, Palestine,
Struma, Persia, Mesopotamia, Marne.
Below crossed swords, draped in Lancer tartan,
a chill so sharp it cuts July in two.

(p. 60)

Here are the catalogues, the sound sequences, the historical and thematic juxtapositions, the aesthetic formalism with its self-conscious near-rhyming, the sudden surprise of the sharp and unexpected turn of image in the final line. Schor's poems are not pyrotechnic – her deliberateness and careful craftsmanship ensures that they are far more than surface flash – but their relish of language and their delight in the unexpected mark them as something very special indeed.

The volume's piece de resistance is, however, the long multi-sectioned title poem, which takes the form of syncopated monologues (as letters or journal entries) in the voices...