Playing the Black Piano

by Bill Holm

In this new collection, noted essayist Bill Holm (Coming Home Crazy, Eccentric Islands, The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth) returns to his true love -- poetry. Like a modern-day Walt Whitman bestriding America and the world, Holm comments on the waywardness and promise of the human species. Playing the Black Piano reflects Holm's time in Iceland (his ancestral home), his ongoing love affair with music, a friend's death from AIDS, and his bold reactions to the world around him. Moving from Oregon forests to the deserts around Tucson, from the endless marketing of long-distance telephone service to the experience of undergoing an MRI, the poems speak of this man's full embrace of the world and his passion for living well.

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

First published February 17, 2004

About the author

Bill Holm was an American poet, essayist, memoirist, and musician.

Holm was born on a farm north of Minneota, Minnesota, the grandson of Icelandic immigrants. He attended Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota where he graduated in 1965. Later, he attended the University of Kansas.

Holm won a Fulbright and went to Iceland for a year, which stretched into longer. He continued to visit Iceland so regularly that his friends there helped him find a house in Hofsós. His last book, The Windows of Brimnes, is about his time in Iceland.

He was Professor Emeritus of English at Southwest Minnesota State University, where he taught classes on poetry and literature until his retirement in 2007. Though Minneota was his home, Holm had traveled the world, teaching English in China, spending summers in Iceland and late winters in Arizona, and visiting Europe and Madagascar.

Holm was a frequent guest on Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion radio show and some of his poems were included in Keillor's Writer's Almanac.

Holm was a McKnight Distinguished Artist in 2008, an award that honors Minnesota artists for their life work.

Reviews

[Tessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the first half of this book but was somewhat let down by the second half. Some of the poems (mainly the ones about Iceland) were incredible but many others very forgettable. A mixed bag.

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I gotta say I wasn’t a big fan of Bill Holm until now. I tried reading “Iron John” and just couldn’t get through it. “Playing the Black Piano” is just musical. There’s quite a variety of poems, ranging from experiences in Iceland to nights on the prairie to classical music to a section of poems revolving around the death of a friend dying of AIDS. In some ways he reminds me of Billy Collins, but Holm is more Norse – sort of withheld humor. An enjoyable collection of poetry.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a captivating collection of free verse by the “polar bear of American literature.” Having graduated from Gustavus (my brother’s alma mater), then having taught at Southwest State University for 27 years (during the time that I was across the border in South Dakota, not far from there), Bill Holm’s work was always on my radar, but I’ve never sat and read one of books cover to cover, poems, essays, or otherwise. His writing is deep and introspective, often written in memoriam.

There were many thought-provoking, enjoyable poems in this collection, but these two stood out to me: “An Early Morning Café,” Holm’s beautiful tribute to cafe workers who died on the 107th story of the World Trade Center on 9/11, and a more light-hearted “Angels We Have Heard on High,” a recollection of singing hymns in church on the Christmas Eves of his childhood.

[Alan Wilt · Rating 5 out of 5]

The character of Bill Holm’s new collection of poems, Playing the Black Piano, can be discerned from reading the book’s dedication page; it is offered in memory of two men

who practiced princely generosity to guests, to literature, to the liveliness and wisdom of the human spirit, who kept their fine old houses open to a little good whiskey and good talk late in the night, who left too soon. Salud, my friends!

Holm lives up to the spirit of these old friends in poems that speak eloquently of places, music, pain, death. He begins with a poem about his ancestral home, Iceland, titled “The Ghost of Wang Wei Looks at Skagafjord”: “How the old Chinese poets would have admired Iceland,” Holm proclaims, “Everything appears one at a time, at great distance,” and then strokes a verbal Zen painting of a poem, including the image of

One farmer
the size of a matchstick walks out of his thimble barn
to his postage-stamp hay field while
over his head a river falls half a mile
off a cliff . . .

In “Night Fishing in Skagafjord” Holm conjures a thirteen-year-old girl fishing till midnight “What does she cast for every night / In this white light that lasts ’til August? / Pink trout? Love? The future? / Or does she fish to practice patience?” In an Icelandic supermarket he approaches the cashier with credit cards ready, only to find that it is a cash-only establishment, and perceives himself in “a foreign country even I have never traveled -- the kingdom of the poor” while impatient housewives mutter in line behind him.

But wait! Here’s 5,000 note -- cash, the hoarded cash of the poor, a
crown or two kept in a cup until there’s enough for bread, milk, salt
horse, a pancake.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
In the kingdom of the poor, every language is foreign, every country is
strange, somewhere you’ve never traveled before, that will not want to
see the likes of you again.

Playing the Black Piano is imbued with a sense of loss -- not just of the two men named in the dedication, but, in “An Early Morning Café,” of those lost in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: “Humans so riddled with hate they turned / from men to bombs smashed the girders / under your café, though they’d never met you, / to murder you for the glory of God.” Holm’s warning in the wake of 9/11 is clear, and applies not just to the perpetrators of that horrific act but to any person or community with an overgrown sense of certainty:

If you think you’ve bagged the one truth
and that truth wants final sacrifice,
then you’ve stepped outside the human race,
and your plane will not land in heaven
wherever you think it might be.

Holm also mourns a public man, Senator Paul Wellstone:

This time, as so often
before, Death snatched a big one
when we could not stand to lose
his voice that spoke, not alone,
but for us millions who longed
for a world green, alive, about to bloom.

In his section of poems about Dr. Mike Doman, Holm’s observations are elegant, direct, and acute.

One night I arrive at the door,
find a note: “I am sick.
Come in quietly. I don’t need
to be told. The handwriting
gave me the news. While he aged
a month, it aged a century.

The dying man has one last vital wish: “. . . he wants to live -- / to rise from the couch, shower, / take everyone to dinner.” But neither he nor his friends can avoid the inevitable.

Still he wants to live,
and about this one last wish,
nothing can be done.

There is poetic justice, however, in the way that one life ending flows and merges to make it’s indelible mark on another.

I take my own hands to the black piano thinking this may be the last
music this lovely man hears in this world. Go out with the best . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
He opens his eyes. “Beautiful,” he says . . . .
After he goes, a day or two later, I found out he’s willed me the black
piano. I’m left to wonder: what music will it make now?

Bill Holm is himself an ebullient, generous, hospitable man, and this collection of poems is chock full of perfectly pitched emotion and finely drawn observation. By inviting us into his losses he provides good medicine for heart, mind, and soul. Playing the Black Piano resonates long after the hands leave the keys.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Any title with a piano in it is going to grab me, but some don’t turn out to be good. This book of poetry is delicious. Holm is wonderful poet and essayist. His poems are real, relatable, and filled with lines that take me to new places I would never have discovered on my own. The black piano refers to a piano in the room of a friend who is dying of AIDs. Using famous piano compositions as the vehicle, Holm takes us through the dying process, from finding out about his friend's illness to scattering the ashes, but it is not depressing; it’s profound. Holm also writes about travel in Iceland, where he has a home, as well as China, the sea of Cortez and various places in the U.S. And he writes about the vagaries of everyday life. This is a book I will turn to many times because the poems truly speak to me.

[Nina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely, lyrical, memorable. You can almost hear Bill Holm's voice as you read. Perfect for folks who 'don't read poetry.'

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally, a book of poetry that I like! Thank you, book group for choosing this for us to read. I will not shut poetry out of my life completely from now on!

[Keli Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of Bill Holm's poems spoke to me. Some didn't. And some sang arias.

[Rachel Coyne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some haunting lines

[Paulette · Rating 5 out of 5]

MN's Bill Holm writes poetry in this book about Iceland, music and death.