The Bonds of Nest and Urn

Poems

Jefferson Holdridge

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9798385261321
  9798385261338
• eBook ISBN:
  9798385261345
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

The Bonds of Nest and Urn examines the forms and purposes of nature and art, revealing how the artist's vision--sometimes Orphic, sometimes Christian--ultimately unites the two. The spirit moves through number and metaphor, and the volume asks whether poetry can exist apart from history or personality, even though both inevitably remain present. The narrative arc of the poems flows from art to nature, though the two remain deeply intertwined. Many pieces focus on flora and fauna, with birds serving as muses and trees imagined both as objects of artistic perspective and as towering emblems of nature, commanding respect and, at times, fear. Stones are regarded as objects of art, reverence, and scientific inquiry, while the poems draw connections among the four classical elements--fire, air, water, and earth. The volume's richly layered personal and cultural perspectives, informed by the poet's American upbringing and years in Ireland and Italy, offer a nuanced exploration of how nature and culture shape human experience. Readers who appreciate poetry with a vivid sense of place will find much to savor.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Next to Nature, Art
• Hands
• Truro
• Stretch of the River
• Early Successional
• Cottage and Stream
• January
• With Respect to the Nude
• Epic and Lyric
• On Caravaggio’s Stolen Painting
• Proxima Centauri
• In Memoriam
• The New-World Firmament
• The Making of Snow
• The Works and Days of Art & Nature
• Song of the Projected Plane
• The Bond
• Nocturne
• The Child
• Human Frailty
• Birdhouses
• Greenhouse
• At the Pale
• Fishes
• Peace Lily
• English Ivy
• The History of Science
• Larousse
• Hawk and Cardinal
• The Deer and the Railroad
• White Oak
• The Oldest Testaments on Folly Beach
• Weather
• Weeping Cherry
• A Month Among the Seasons
• Wild Copperhead at the Zoo
• The Ballad of Spike and Seed
• From Another Country
• The Red-Tailed Site
• Plundered Houses
• The Doni Tondo of Michelangelo
• Sonnets in Search of an Object
• Sonnets in Place of a Subject
• The Secular Trees
• The Art of Balor’s Eye
• Thirteen Resemblances
• Flora and Hypatia
• For a Weeping Cherry
• The Blank Signature (René Magritte, 1965)
• Art & Nature
• Nest & Urn
• Acknowledgments