The Wells of Venice contains sequences, blank verse, and lyrics that meditate upon visual and literary Venetian art, as well as the myths, history, religion, and politics that shaped the culture of this extraordinary human achievement. Founded on fear of invasion and hope for refuge, Venice becomes a warning symbol of imperial arrogance and ambition. The waters of the lagoon and the fragility of the city mirror the relevance of the ephemeral in themes such as departure from and return to home. On the one hand, the vanishings that take place are interior and exterior, literal and figurative, with the differences between often blurred, while on the other, the religious art of this city remains a transcendent expression of its history, one that at its best always remembers Unde Origo Inde Salus, "Salvation is in the Origin."
Director of Wake Forest University Press and professor of English at WFU in North Carolina, Jefferson Holdridge is the author of three previous volumes of poetry: Eruptions (2013) and Devil’s Den and Other Poems (2015), and The Sound Thereof (2017). He has written two critical books, W.B. Yeats (2000) and Paul Muldoon (2008). His most recent, Stepping Through Origins: Nature, Home, and Landscape in Irish Literature, will come out with Syracuse in 2021.
“The elegance of Jefferson Holdridge’s poems is born out of the natural cadence of language, which he wisely assumes, and his communion with a city he loves: Venice. Tensions lead to resolutions that are organic to each scene and to the characters, historical and contemporary, who contribute to his love. . . . Conflict yields to beauty, angst to grace: enduring antidotes to the ennui of our times.”
—Sofia M. Starnes, Virginia Poet Laureate Emerita
“Holdridge captures in exact language those moments when the imaginative audacity that is Venice is somehow chastened by the pressure of a felt and actual experience. This is an art which begins in traditional metaphor but returns us to a radical realism—fragile, beautiful, and defiant of time’s erosions. Here are poems of luminous elegance, immaculate as cut glass yet true to the impure elements out of which all lovely things are made. They offer a response to a dreamlike city that is at once urgently personal and serenely historical.”
—Declan Kiberd, author of Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation
“It’s here, the cornucopia effect: relentless patience, tranquil urgency, radical relevance; the architectural petulance of the Twin Towers reduced to rubble, zone zero, the goose-stepping march of history; will Venice also fall? Epoch of change or change of epoch? The transience of magnificence, brittleness of beauty; ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, not a stone will remain upon stone.’ Craftsmanship: compelling rhythms and reflections, rhymes subtle, discreet, inevitable. The unflinching poetic gaze, refusing to settle for the apparent, the implacable pursuit of the underlying—what lies under and doesn’t lie or disappoint—piercing the eternal now. Nothingness fails to prevail. Being irresistibly is.”
—Colum Power, author of James Joyce’s Catholic Categories
“Jefferson Holdridge is a poet par excellence, yet his poems—be they short lyrics or extended meditations on historical figures and artworks—are more than structures of ‘purposeless beauty.’ When the poet writes, ‘Imagine a city you once called home,’ we better show up ready to follow him down every nook and cranny, prepared ‘for any tremor or rising tide.’ Replete with wisdom and wonder, Holdridge’s work is a testament to the indefatigability of the human spirit.”
—Piotr Florczyk, author of East & West and From the Annals of Kraków
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