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Disciples of an Uncertain Season
Copyright © 1998
by Larry Holland
Up the Creek Publishing
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At the time of Larry Holland's death in March of 1999,
Disciples of an Uncertain Season, published just the fall
before, had virtually sold out. This volume reprints
Disciples in its entirety with the addition of a number of
poems previously published available only in magazines
and journals. An introduction and afterword by his friends
and fellow poets Red Shuttleworth and Neil Harrison have
been added as well. This enterprise has been a labor of
love, and this collection is dedicated to the friends, family,
and students of Larry Holland. — from the jacket
Mountains and seashore advertise beauty any idiot can see. Prairies whisper
their messages; loudmouths and speeders never notice. Larry
Holland has listened long and well to the Platte River Valley in Nebraska,
as well
as to his own ancestor, and ours. These reports from the frontier are filled
with poems hot as
an Arab horse, with wisdom intricate as a cedar thicket. — Linda
Hasselstrom
Holland's poems have an extraordinary sense of place — his beloved
Nebraska Sand Hills and river valleys. But more than this,
Holland understands the perils of life, the certainty of death, and the
beauty to be found in each. — Jane Candia Coleman
Ghosts wander through these pages — the dignified shades of our elders,
the restless
spirits of suicides, the swift shadows of deer and birds and dogs, the
fading outlines of community and youth. Holland, heir to blood and
bloodsport, reaches into his arsenal of poems to ask again and again
the question all survivors ask. — JV Brummels
Holland's plainspoken attentiveness to creatures, people, the feel of an
old double-barrel
shotgun, winter light over a field, brings the world wonderfully close.
And praise be for that. It is a wonderful book and
deserves to be read and read again. — Harry Humes
These hard-hitting poems bear witness to the fundamental tenet subscribed to
by both Coach and Poet: poetry in motion springs forth
...running on the juice of your lifetime...
thanks, always, to the strong line. If poetry was
as celebrated as Cornhusker Football, Larry Holland
would be the Tom Osborne of Nebraska letters. — Paul Zarzyski
This Holland collection of poems is what a fine man and a fine woman might
read at evening after working cows ahorseback or taking down a deer,
whisky glasses half full. The poems in Disciples of an Uncertain
Season
are of the highest order, in exquisite synchronicity with the land
he loves, true to the plains and the people who love them. ...
takes the sort of chances that create poems that must be read and read again ...
— Red Shuttleworth
Holland's poems are not about just the beauty of the prairie grass, but of what is
buried beneath the prairie.
They are about the Nebraska sandhills, the wildlife, the tame
life, and about the people who live on it and love it as much as he did.
His poems hit you hard in the heart. — Mary Maas, Nebraska Territory
To use his own words, he possesses the talent to make a poem's pulse
thump against the silence of its own making. Like the land he loves,
he has come to own a poem's
terrain as much as it owns him." — Don Welch
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My Link to the Plains
Copyright © 1996
by Larry Holland
Main-Travelled Roads #3
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Holland speaks of the land and of the people tied to the land and his connection to both
in this essay. He writes his images so that you can see them when you read the words.
He shares his love for the grass country and the Nebraska Plains in his poems and says,
"a writer of and conditioned by the Plains finds the words in his territory, in the thing
he's come to know as his life." — Mary Maas, Nebraska Territory
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What the Critics Say
Bibliography
