Bord f繹r En

Praise for Bord for En

"I am learning to bear / this terrible miracle of stones," writes David Holper in Bord f繹r En, his latest collection of poems. These poems are full of miracles-hiking through Northern California's Headwaters Forest, reflecting elegiacally on a fraught relationship with his father, and navigating the emotional terrain of the Covid-19 pandemic. But this is no mere pandemic chronicle. Holper's work invites us into a larger meditation on resilience, grief, and wonder. "Be teachable," he urges, "until you draw your last breath." Bord f繹r En is a poignant, lyrical waypoint on that lifelong journey.

-Sandra Simonds, author of Assia

Beginning in our confinement via Covid circa 2020, the poems in David Holper's beautiful book aver that the lessons of solitude prove the door to outside is any one that you open. Bord f繹r En takes readers on a pilgrimage, our pilgrim-poet navigating through the enforced interior of a pandemic to arrive at the real locale of human solitude, wherein the pain of the past is brought to task and that pain, while not gone, is diminished. The physical effort I felt in reading these poems, especially those dedicated to hiking, seemed as tactile and true as the stations-of-the-cross.

-Claudia Keelan, author of We Step into the Sea: New and Selected Poems

Tikkun olam is Jewish spiritual practice of "world repair," poet David Holper tells us, and that phrase could serve as the title for this book, because there is really no better way of speaking of this holy project. In lucid and clear lyric poems (well-crafted, but never drawing attention to their craft), the poet addresses the world's beauty and describes the hardest sorrows we inflict upon the planet and each other, in order to involve us in the action of repair and to pull us closer to "the hour...when the spirit awakens us / to all that is undone." Moving through landscapes he makes vividly available-whether he's speaking of the Pacific Northwest or Spain-Holper uses his considerable gifts with language to get his readers to where "we are left / in mute witness of our lives at once so brief, so luminous." Bord f繹r En is an invitation to a pilgrimage as well as a feast: you will want to take the nourishing and healing journey: "If this is the only way the world may be mended, / then I say yes..."

-Laura Mullen, author of EtC