Pleiades: Literature in Context

Karen Paul Holmes's new poetry collection, No Such Thing as Distance, reads with the structural integrity of a memoir-in-poems. Each poem is crucial to this story of the poet's life. It would be false to write of an anonymous "speaker" rather than Holmes herself, as she so clearly articulates her identities of daughter, sister, wife, ex-wife, and mother. The conversational tone and Holmes's reticence to show off with language tricks assure that these poems tell their stories well. Holmes proclaims on her website that her "favorite poets write poems that are understandable, using clear words and images to share stories and truths." She has accomplished this mission in her current collection.

Though the Holmes of this collection lives in Georgia, she carries the "crisp apple wind" of her Michigan childhood inside her. Her father's Macedonian roots and her mother's Russian-Australian origins enrich the soil where Holmes herself bloomed. As place is a central motif in her work, she includes poems set in Maine, Tennessee, Montana, and elsewhere.

Nevertheless, the concerns in these poems go beyond place to the people closest to Holmes. In "To My Father: Man with Three Names," her father's story is shared. When he was a child, his village was annexed by Greece. The Greeks forced him to change his name. When he immigrated to the United States, his name was changed again. At his funeral, the family returned to him his birth name. Long after his death, they remember him as they make "zelnik / still dance the Makedonia and Pajadushko."

"Confessions of an Ugly Nightgown" shares the poignant story of the poet's mother, a war bride, traveling with a silk nightgown, a treat for her new husband. What is particularly poignant is that Holmes still hangs onto this tattered family heirloom "in a high-up box with other vestiges / from her mother" though her parents are gone.

Even more important than the nightgown are the recipes, such as Macedonian bean soup and zelnik, a meat pastry, that are passed on by family. In the poem "Counterbalance," food is a central focus as Holmes cares for her mother who is stricken with cancer:

Mealtimes, she would frown, push away child's portions

no matter what recipe I tried, except the marijuana-pill night

when at 10 p.m. she asked me to bake a cake,

and I called my sister: Mum has the munchies!

The family shows love through food, and the call for a cake gives Holmes the first hope she's experienced throughout her mother's illness.

The cooking within these poems conjures up the shared and to-be-shared family history of Holmes and her family. Each dish prepared is appended to the back of the book, reminding the reader that these poems are not flights of fancy, but valuable artifacts of the Paul family and of Holmes's personal life story.

Throughout the book, the reader is reminded [End Page 224] of the nature of identity and home and how they intersect. In "Road Stories," the places Holmes has lived, as well as the places she has not (as represented by the TV viewed through someone else's front window), converge to mean home, "no matter how dust-blown."

Because the book is an integrated memoir, not until the last poem is read can one fully comprehend the definition of home that Holmes has created in this collection. In the last poem, "Crossing the International Date Line," Holmes comes to understand that she knows the meaning of "Without time, there can be no distance." Memory compresses all the events of a lifetime with others' stories, which become one with the memory. As this occurs, time evaporates and so does distance. The poet need not look elsewhere for home because it is with her as the places and people she has taken into her heart.