Critical Commentary
In Holding Ground the poet touches the world and senses nuances in the terrain of what lives in the heart and in the mind. In a simple eloquence, Willard’s poems articulate ordinary and difficult moments to strike the genuine pitch of what it means to be fully alive. The poet celebrates our possibilities even as he knows our lives are filled with all the spirit’s dangers. The poems are clear and evocative, an elegant accomplishment. —Afaa Michael Weaver
Bruce Willard writes with balanced—and earned—accuracy from the heart of his experience. The natural world is not, for him, an image ‘kitty,’ but a powerful real presence that through its resistances, as well as its vexing beauty, marks out the reach of inwardness. The poems are clear windows on the defining scenes of that inwardness: love, separation, family, and coming to terms with pain and joy.” —Sven Birkerts
‘Lord, give me what you’ve already given / Until I unbelieve it so thoroughly / I believe again.’ Holding Ground finds a man at the crossroads of his life where music, memory, and desire converge, the torn self at the root. These quietly powerful poems are the thoughts and visions of a man broken open, moving forward past exhaustion, who endures his own heart as the seasons unfold around him and the tides shift at his feet, staying the course, holding ground. —Dorianne Laux
