The poems in Untying the Knot (Kelsay Books, 2014), by Karen Paul Holmes, detail her two-year journey through a gamut of trials that rival Job’s. As the title suggests, divorce is the over-arching disaster. With what Thomas Lux described as grace, humor and self-awareness, Holmes relates the year in which she learned that her husband of 30 years was sleeping with one of her close friends, her mother had terminal Lymphoma, and her brother had a life-threatening cancer requiring dangerous surgery. None of these griefs had been foreshadowed; in confessional, free-verse poems, Holmes reaches out to her reader, perhaps the only friend she trusts with the foreign thoughts cycling through her mind during the sanity shaking upheaval in her formerly charmed life.
Unsurprisingly, the themes of this book include heartbreak, denial and anger, but the transcendent theme is the author’s flight from bitterness, which she feels might swamp her life. We follow Holmes’s quixotic quest to heal herself with the assistance of therapists, Buddhist counselors, Zumba lessons and her pen. The great revelation, at least for this reader, was the success Holmes achieved in overcoming her grief by clinging to her values, which include belief in active measures to cleanse herself of negative emotions.
Holmes employs an assortment of styles. There are terse vignettes, such as “How to Undo a Kiss,” printed here in its entirety:
withdraw tongue
slowly draw lips together, then
release his
remove fingers from his hair
un-caress neck
pull your body away
from
all
the places
it
touches his
and the brief snapshot “Rumination,” which plumbs her obsessive thoughts. Here she scatters short lines down the page to depict her wish to crack her head open and let out:
He said…/ I said…/ If only he…/ If only I…/ Why?/ Why?/ Why?
These little nuggets are interspersed with longer narratives of up to three pages. For example, “Mantra Trouble at the Meditation Retreat” is a much funnier sketch on the topic of obsessive thought, neatly making its point by repetition of a mangled mantra, and “Telling My Mother” recounts the long-dreaded rite of informing her ailing parent that the son-in-law she has learned to love is withdrawing from the family, essentially abandoning both of them. The way her mother accepts this news is a revelation of the source of Holmes’ inner strength.
The book is organized into five sections which move through the stages of her divorce in roughly chronological order. The first section limns the secure life Holmes inhabited before her husband’s affair, opening with “Drawn Into Circles,” a poem about the way her dogs rearrange clean towels in their beds into round nests. The poem gradually broadens its focus, comprising, by the end, a metaphysical reverie about cycles of human experience juxtaposed against unbending cultural habits. The author varies stanza shapes to reinforce her themes. Three stanzas curve, but one is blockish—the one which deals with the strict lines our culture has imposed at all stages of life, from babies’ cribs to coffins.
Life lowers the boom on Holmes in the second section, when she discovers her husband’s affair.
The emotions on display include utter despair and black humor. Holmes utilizes a number of forms and poetic devices to match the wide swings in her inner life. In “Beyond My Ken” (Ken being her ex’s name as well as a synonym for knowledge), Holmes uses a lower case “i” to refer to herself. This stylistic choice reflects the devastation of her husband’s betrayal on her sense of self:
i fail the test…i drift…the bottom tempts me.
By the end of this collection, the reader comes to understand the tremendous strength of character and spiritual reserves at Holmes’s disposal, so this poem truly marks the nadir in her emotional life.
In, “Suddenly, Old-Fashioned Words Apply to Me,” Holmes takes a trip through the dictionary to investigate the meaning of her new marital status, almost as if rubbing her nose in the truth—but not without an arch sense of humor:
Betrayed
Scorned
Divorcée
The self-help book even calls me
Cuckhold
My man found a convenient…
Throughout this section, tenderness toward her husband, whom she still loves, alternates with anger and confusion. For example, she speaks of a pillow Ken told her he had cried into:
Let me lay my face there
that I may absorb your sorrow.
In the third section, Ken returns. He asks her to dinner on their 32nd anniversary. When he suggests they give things another try, Holmes jumps back in, but only five poems later, after using a Persian rug and a game show as metaphors for all the emotional baggage they have between them, she ends the shortest section with this 2-line nugget:
Woulda, Shoulda, Coulda: didn’t
now get on with it.
Section four deals with the nuts and bolts of dismantling their lives and contains the title poem. They undo the kiss, untie the knot, hire lawyers, sit across conference tables, and sell their home. The poem about her diamond, “The Faceting of Forever,” is one of the strongest in the collection. It traces the eons-long formation of a diamond, its chiseled face and prisms, its acquisition and setting. Each stanza of this poem begins with a one word line, usually a verb, which sums up the rest of the complex data in the stanza, such as:
Apply
five gigapascals of pressure.
Bake at two thousand degrees
for a million years or more.
By the seventh and final stanza, one she’s filled with chasms of extra spaces, the weight of the world has been added to the simple act of taking off her ring:
A diamond can carve anything
even cleave rock hard faith
when the circle moves
from left hand to right
severing forever.
In the fifth and final section, the author moves on. She mourns her mother, communes with siblings and reconsiders her femininity. She even tries to forgive her former friend and checks out men for the first time in decades. By the end of the book this reader rejoiced as Holmes refused to wear those old labels the dictionary dished up and cheered when she let herself shimmy in “Zumba with Lady Gaga.” Spoiler alert: at the end she finds a new guy to take her dancing.
Patricia Percival Thomas lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where she thinks about the big picture while micromanaging her garden. She is the author of the chapbook Bargain with the Speed of Light (Kattywompus Press, 2015). The book tells the story of a box of poems left by her brother after his death and how the mysteries there led to her practice of poetry. Five of her poems can be found in . Her poems also appear in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume 5: Georgia, Town Creek Poetry, Stonepile Writer’s Anthology: Volume II, and other venues. In what seems like a past life, she graduated from Duke University and the Emory University School of Law.
