Boxelder Bug Variations: A Meditation on an Idea in Language and Music
To say that Boxelder Bug Varr.4tions is an unusual book is indeed an understatement. It is unusual in its subject, in its range of forms, and most of all, in the incredible energy and whimsy of its imagination. We move from poems to meditations, from a conversation with an entomologist to an essay on clavichords and fugues, from musical scores ("Boxelders on Parade," "Bach's Elder Lament," "Boxelder Gavotte") to fables, haiku, and even a bit of family and local history. In short, if it's hard to pin down exactly what this book is, it's not at all hard to be delighted, charmed, even provoked by it. What Holm ultimately reminds us has to do with overlooking the socalled insignificant things, and in so doing overlooking the power of imagination itself. For it is imagination that is the real subject of this book, as in this typically Holm-sian poem with the improbable title "Isak Dinesen, When She Was Old, Dined Only On Oysters, White Grapes, And Champagne. The Boxelder Bug, Too, practices A Parsimonious Though Elegant Diet": "The bug slides/out from behind/the radio dial/where all winter/he lived/eating music." For those of us who have not forgotten that small and unpretentious things are the most durable and surprising subjects for Art, this book is a rare, wonderful, and most welcome gift. --FromIndependent Publisher