The Holding Hours

by Christianne Balk

Emotion, raw and unadorned, is woven through the poems of Christianne Balk's The Holding Hours . Part I explores the subtle and surprising transformations that come from caring for her young, neurologically injured daughter. Insights unfold in metaphor and persona below the surface of an exquisitely observed life.

Gazing through the lens of other lives challenged by disability and illness, including those of John Muir and the 16th-century Saint Germaine Cousin, these poems place personal experience in the context of pastoral poetic traditions, disability studies, and the history of political disruption.

Balk anchors these meditations within the landscape of the Pacific Northwest. She examines her (and our) relationship with nature―the moon snail, the azalea, snow geese, the dog rose―sing the precise and unsentimental language of a trained naturalist. The sounds and images evoked reveal a stunning artistry―a mediation between self and the world and a celebration of the beauty and fragility of life and the anticipation of rebirth.

88 pages, Hardcover

First published August 23, 2015

Reviews

[Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christianne Balk has a voice that trembles with awareness of the sanctity of the life force in so many of its manifestations, in times of plenty and of hunger. She can write the significance of a moment in the presence of a silk moth caught in a jar, the stray cat rousting goldfinches or the cycle of a dog rose from bud to hip, the casting of a fish line again while the daylight ages.

She writes with uncommon gratitude for what she has been given, what she has witnessed, what she shares with her daughter, her companions present and long deceased. She awakens in this reader a certain reverence for the landscapes, most in the Pacific Northwest, I visit in her poems.