Reviews

Excerpts from selected reviews and endorsements of Jane Holland's poetry

 

'Extremely powerful and varied ... Holland has both the clarity for the reader and the mastery of language to say what she means in a way that makes the brain tingle with both shock and pleasure ... This collection is outstanding.'
Angela Topping, Stride Magazine, April 2007, on Boudicca & Co

'An original and moving re-imagining of one of the great works of medieval literature.'

Matt Merritt, Happenstance, on The Lament of the Wanderer

'One of the more ambitious works of public poetry generated through a local laureateship.'

David Floyd, Sphinx 10, on On Warwick: Poems from the Warwick Laureateship 

'A modernist pièce de resistance.'

David Morley, Introduction, On Warwick: Poems from the Warwick Laureateship

I reached the fourth section of the book, the Boudicca sequence, and everything went electric ... There's a touch of Vicki Feaver about the violence and the cool delight in blood and innards, but the work is quite distinctive ... I was dashing from poem to poem, completely compelled.'
Helena Nelson, Ambit 2007, on Boudicca & Co

'... we need only compare Holland's work with the anti-war 'poetry' of Harold Pinter to gain some indication of how rich and rewarding her response to modern conflict is - by shifting methods towards the imaginative and narrative elements of poetry, rather than the rhetorical and political. In this sense, the 'Boudicca' sequence has a great deal in common with David Harsent's Legion, which represents a similar attempt by a non-combatant poet to engage intelligently with the realities of war. This is, frankly, an outstanding collection, and Holland, as a result, can now count herself amongst the front rank of contemporary British poets.'  

Simon Turner, Gists and Piths, 2007, on Boudicca & Co

'Jane Holland's route into poetry was the unusual one of snooker, in which she was briefly a professional ... Snooker is actually a good metaphor for poetry: angling off the cush is like setting up a rhyme scheme, full rhymes give off a satisfying clack ... Besides snooker, she writes well of the eternal verities: 'The Newel Post' is a pivot around which life turns: 'I recognise her by her changing tread. / I am that point along the passageway / where flesh and spirit tremble into wood'
Peter Forbes, in Poetry Review, on Brief History of a Disreputable Woman
 

'Jane Holland doesn't mince words, and sets her stall out straightaway in the first poem in this book, the manifesto-ish 'Pulse': 'I am not a woman poet. / I am a woman and a poet. / The difference is in the eyes.' What makes Jane Holland such an exciting prospect for poetry is that she hasn't arrived by the usual route; instead of hours in libraries and years polishing her sonnets, she's spent hours in snooker halls and years polishing the end of her cue with a cube of chalk ... 

Elsewhere, Holland explores relationships, being a mother, being a lover, and simply being alive in a complex world. They're not new subjects, of course, but what marks out these poems is what marks out the good snooker player: concentration and placing. The concentration shows in the way that Holland can make a poem that is about One Thing carry on being about One Thing all the way through. I often find that poems which are meant to be about War, or Love, or a bus stop, suddenly lurch into being about something else and the poet often thinks this is clever but it isn't: it shows a lack of concentration. Holland looks straight down the cue and the hall falls silent, and a poem like 'Post Sirenists' is the result, a poem about people who have survived some kind of holocaust: 'We're coming out like moles / at the end of a dark tunnel, // edging, noses to the light, / whiskers flaring ... '

The placing is to do with line endings, stanza breaks, the things I find myself banging on about (to myself and others) over and over again. Holland is good at line endings ... I cited a piece in The Guardian about one of our matches in which the writer said that Barnsley striker John Hendrie was in front of everyone else on the pitch in action and thought, and it's that being ahead of everyone else that makes for good poetry: it's the ability to see where all the moves might lead, where all the possibilities might end up, even to see all the imponderables and make them much less imponderable.

That's the kind of poet Jane Holland is, a superb thinker-ahead, a person who always knows where the poem is going to go, even before the poem has been written; and that's not in any reductive way, that's in a way that makes you raise your fist and go YESSSS!'

Ian McMillan, poet (in Poetry Review) on Brief History of a Disreputable Woman

UNPUBLISHED ENDORSEMENTS:

"From versions of Anglo-Saxon to the unabashed lyric of pastoral, by way of the dragon women and velvet-palmed men of a new fairy-tale, Jane Holland’s Boudicca & Co is a book of adventurous, resonant inventions. As the title suggests, it offers a new view from the interior—of both country and psyche—in which history and geography are co-opted in effortless interplay. It’s a work of synthesis, and of poetic and emotional maturity, in which Holland emerges as a true craftswoman, a supple and graceful thinker with an effortless grasp of line, at the heart of the English lyric tradition."
Fiona Sampson, former editor of Poetry Review

"Boudicca & Co. is a bold re-imagining of Britishness. Our contemporary England of Sunday roasts and cyberspace gives way to a wild and alien landscape, a place that Holland lays glinting before us "like a coin tossed in the sun / blunt-edged, foreign." Steeped in myth and medieval poetry, this is a land of "ruins under rain," hares, oaks, gargoyles and the Green Man. At the heart of it, embodying both Britain's fierce beauty and its bloodied past, is Boudicca, and her voice is a startling achievement: modern, pitch-black, funny, and yet hauntingly lyrical. Jane Holland’s second collection is full of love and astonishment, a tribute to the resilience of women, to the power of literature, and, most of all, to: 'England // my beleaguered sunken isle.' "
Clare Pollard, poet and editor

" '—the grip/ of the wheel, a licence to roam.' Jane Holland’s poetry smoulders and blazes. Take your deepest breath, and go with her."
Alison Brackenbury, poet

"Jane Holland modernises myths and mythic characters, and so achieves a kind of resonant timelessness in poem after poem ... Jane Holland uses language both as a weapon and as a shield. This is an intelligent book, knife-sharp at moments, tender and gentle at others."
Brendan Kennelly, poet (on Brief History of a Disreputable Woman)

'Jane Holland discovered, more or less by chance, a passion and a talent for snooker. She entered a man's world where the battle to overcome bigoted rules and attitudes was as great as the battle to perfect her own skills in the field. She has turned her formidable energies and skills to poetry now with similarly turbulent and successful results.' 

Maura Dooley, poet and editor