Bill Holm – författare

“The ground bass is failure; America is the key signature; Pauline Bardal is the lyrical tune that sings at the center; Minneota, Minnesota, is the staff on which the tunes are written.” So begins the masterful title piece from Bill Holm’s first book of essays, The Music of Failure. This collection introduced to many the singular vision and voice of literary giant Bill Holm, a writer who had traveled well and widely but came back to his hometown of Minneota-the town of his immigrant Icelandic ancestors-as, in his words, “for all practical purposes a failure.” What emerges from these pages, and from Holm’s cherished writings over the next two and a half decades, is anything but failure. From his ruminations on life in Minneota, family history, and the “horizontal grandeur” of the Midwestern prairie to a poetry-reading tour of Minnesota nursing homes and an account of a naked man eating lilacs out of his garden, The Music of Failure is a lyrical and surprising compilation that finds Holm mining the stories and places that captivated him and continue to enthrall his many readers. This 25th anniversary edition includes poignant portraits of Holm and the history of The Music of Failure by Jim Heynen and David Pichaske, along with an essay Holm requested be added to this new edition, “Is Minnesota in America Yet?” With beautiful black-and-white photographs by Tom Guttormsson, The Music of Failure is Bill Holm at both his early and quintessential best, an inimitable and much-missed writer who illuminates our private and common lives through both our quiet victories and our sublime failures.

Poet, musician, wit, and polemicist—Bill Holm is one of kind. A Minnesotan of Icelandic ancestry, his travels have taken him all over the world, providing material for a number of rich and memorable books.In this, his most ambitious work to date—a book “as forceful, insightful, and lyrical as ever” (Los Angeles Times)—Holm travels to Brimnes, his fisherman’s cottage on the shore of a fjord in northern Iceland. Looking west from this place of seemingly endless and kaleidoscopic light, and surrounded by little more than the sound of the sea and the birds beyond his windows, he considers America—“my home, my citizenship, my burden.”In the tradition of Walt Whitman and Henry Thoreau, The Windows of Brimnes offers a singular perspective that is at once incisive and amusing, provocative and congenial.

Poet, musician, wit, and polemicist—Bill Holm is one of kind. A Minnesotan of Icelandic ancestry, his travels have taken him all over the world, providing material for a number of rich and memorable books.In this, his most ambitious work to date—a book “as forceful, insightful, and lyrical as ever” (Los Angeles Times)—Holm travels to Brimnes, his fisherman’s cottage on the shore of a fjord in northern Iceland. Looking west from this place of seemingly endless and kaleidoscopic light, and surrounded by little more than the sound of the sea and the birds beyond his windows, he considers America—“my home, my citizenship, my burden.”In the tradition of Walt Whitman and Henry Thoreau, The Windows of Brimnes offers a singular perspective that is at once incisive and amusing, provocative and congenial.

“The finest poems Holm has ever written.” —MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNEIn this collection of poems, Bill Holm—like a modern-day Walt Whitman bestriding America and the world—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 Tuscon, from the endless marketing of long-distance telephone service to the experience of undergoing an MRI, these poems speak of Holm’s full embrace of the world and his passion for living well.This is a wise, musical collection from one of Minnesota’s most treasured poets.

Throughout his life and in his writing, Bill Holm was a humanist whose obsessions included mortality and eternity. He paid special attention to the notion of cycles, patterns, movements, and processes, and many of his most moving poems are dedicated to the friends and family he helped through the last stages of their lives. Collecting the best and most recent poems from Holm's oeuvre, The Chain Letter of the Soul paints a portrait of a man of great heart, broad vision, and startling prescience. Here, fans remember many of their favorites, and new readers discover an enduring voice of American literature through such poems as "Kafka Only Imagined It," "The Dead Get By with Everything," "My Old Friend AT&T Writes Me a Personal Letter," and "Lemon Pie." In these poems, the personal, vulnerable side of a great public figure is revealed.