Between the two poem-pairs bookending my hermeneutic overlay, there are many heteroglossic pieces that enrich the whole with compelling, cross-referenced detail. As with any collection, there are less strong passages, but, altogether, Keeps is an engaging work due to its philosophical probing, striking imagery and technical control. Holt has a sensitive feel for diction and makes fine use of a range of aural devices (which I have largely passed over for what, to me, are the work’s more interesting elements). Pushed to name favourites, I might suggest ‘The Indigo Banjo, or Methodologies for Outcomes’, a reflection on the relationship between rational thought, sense and imagination – or the conscious and subconscious mind – as they affect Holt’s writing process.¹ Inspired by Wallace Stevens’ ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ (which, in turn, refers to Picasso’s ‘Old Guitarist’), this five-part, structurally varying poem begins impersonally, and concludes in the poet’s own voice, with a tender image of her metaphorically finding the keys to a poem – her version of paradise. Once more, this poem destabilises and maintains both the self and the lyric, and points to the complexities involved in defining either of these as fixed categories. In the face of all such indeterminacies, Holt appears to reach a kind of settled ambivalence, or a way of abiding the multiple, vascillating parts that make up life. Her inclusion of a quote from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, as a preface to the ‘Balthazar’ poem, expresses this best:

‘[I]t is possible to use one’s resources to assemble or repair the murderous part-objects into something like a whole. Once assembled to one’s own specifications, the more satisfying object is available … to offer one comfort.

In suggesting this comfort, Holt finally departs from Lowell, who never managed to hold to an affirmative attitude in response to Nietzsche’s dismissal of overarching truth. Inserting Sedgwick’s words (and championing art generally) indicates that for Holt, existential contentment may be accessible: in using one’s ‘resources’ (thought, memory, dreams, sense – what’s both within and beyond personal control), one can make something steadying out of life’s crazed and moving parts. This something, which is ‘like a whole’ but is not One, is art.

I could quite easily carry on spotlighting poems from this impressive collection, but, instead, I will conclude with a caveat. While a few poems are written with a lighter hand and are satisfyingly graspable straight away, many present an intertextual and theoretical density that precludes immediate affective impact. Unless the reader has the same artistic interests as the poet, some heavy esoteric barriers will be met, meaning that, in order to gain the most from these works, the reader must approach with patience and be willing to research beyond the poems themselves. While some will experience this abstruseness as irksome, I am inclined to appreciate it from a political standpoint: it can be read as constituting a quite modernist act of resistance to the simplistic and superfluous nature of much written material – including ‘literature’ – published today.