“Birdcall a doorlatch,” this book begins, and we enter into a world of “forest bathing” on trails of the East Bay Area parklands, undertaken while recuperating from a brain injury. This is a refractory world of senses heightened and disrupted: a world of suns blaring, finger-leaves falling, huge beetles glistening, train-horns blendering the sky.
But Alter’s third collection goes beyond a document of senses askew in the woods. “Whose woods,” the poems ask, searching out multiple layers of the landscape in time and space. Texts drawn from first European encounters are pressured in a series of erasures; lyrics investigate the pressures put on the land and its original inhabitants. These include poems of a redwood forest clear-cut twice, a refinery dominating the skyline, and one tracing a creek on its course through parkland and city, dammed into lakes, culverted under mini-malls, until it drains into the bay at the foot of that refinery.
Part elegy, part pastoral, part ode to beloved and beleaguered set-asides, Hills Full of Holes journeys in widening understandings of injuries to body and land, and their possible recoveries.
Trying to heal from a concussion, Dan Alter walks the parkland trails and hills of the East Bay, day after day. The poems he composes on his walks echo other walkers-Frost, Yeats, Thoreau-but also weave a new and plangent music of longing and mourning, rooting and wandering, of repair and unraveling. Amid crow-scrape and ant-data, Alter explores a landscape of ghosts and historic violence, of memory and erasure. “Please Mr. Wind reshuffle me,” he writes, but his poems reshuffle us, too.
Tess Taylor, author of Rift Zone and Work & Days
Beguiling. Bewildering. Beautiful. Foreboding. Hills Full of Holes, Dan Alter’s multivalent, musical collection of poems, evokes our planet’s majesty and peril as developers bulldoze forests and birds seek new migration patterns: “The sky turns/ its back on us but we/ can’t tell because it’s/ also blue.” Recovering from a traumatic brain injury, our poet hikes trails in the woods and hills overing the East Bay in California, seeking to read the world or have the world read him. Our speaker seeks remedy in birds whose calls he does not know, “almost neon/ in the canopy/ what time is/ it they/ keep saying.” Gerard Manley Hopkins who wept when trees were cut, Thoreau who fixed Walden Pond like an eye on the world, Frost who stopped in the woods, and novelist Richard Powers who sings of our mistakes rattle and comfort throughout these poems. If you love the earth, are calmed by walks in the forest, need nature to thrive, then place these gentle poems by your bedside. Though rapacious early explorers, contemporary money mongers, and ongoing climate change have carved holes in our world, these poems’ lyrical witness will leave you whole.
Spencer Reece, an Episcopal priest and author of The Clerk’s Tale and The Road to Emmaus
Subtle, spare poems, many of them set in the hiking trails above Berkeley, California, expand into a book that examines the land as an extension of our physical selves, our journey through physical space and also excavating the layers of history, conquest, and urban development. These immersive poems open interior and exterior worlds and diminish dichotomies of plant and human, nature and industry, history and now. Tender and vivid, these poems ask the reader to change perspectives and see the world anew.
Judy Halebsky, author of Spring and a Thousand Years and Tree Line
Dan Alter’s
poems, reviews, and translations have been published widely. His first collection, My Little Book of Exiles, won the 2022 Cowan Writer’s poetry prize. A volume of translations, Take a Breath, You’re Getting Excited, was published in 2024. He lives in Berkeley with his wife and daughter where he works at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life.