One way to read Mangrove, Bill Hollands’s debut collection from ELJ Editions, is as a reckoning with memory and the way the past can seem stubbornly detectable at the edges of the present, even as it stays irrecoverable. One can also read Mangrove as the work of a poet who is decidedly ambivalent about this kind of elevated lens for interpretation—for all of its serious sifting through time, this is a collection that is just as likely to diffuse a poem’s emotional apogee with a wink and a goofy gesture as it is to trail off into deliberate, imagistic abstraction. Mangrove moves seamlessly between these modes—its poems are genuinely, continuously surprising, in their use of humor as a foil to nostalgia, their embrace of absurdity over sentimentality, and their insistence on revisiting moments that do not seem to mean very much, until Hollands, capably and gorgeously, shows you that they do.
Take a poem like “Presidential Fitness Test.” Hollands begins in what for many readers will be familiar terrain, “the ritual / humiliation. Seven demonstrations / of my inadequacy for the red- / faced Phys Ed teacher.” We think we know where we are going, and Hollands takes us there, initially: the depiction of the single, pitiful pull-up and the dirt. Then, a frame shift:
Girls did
“hang time” instead, and in 4th grade
Laura Lugar hung in there
for hours. Like a banana
on a hook, she thrust her chin
over the metal bar, curled her body
into a crescent and didn’t
budge.
Suddenly, we’re in delightfully new territory. Hollands’s speaker throughout these poems is conscious, even as a child, of all the ways in which he’s being watched as a queer kid growing up in Florida—by his mother, who can see in her son “the tentativeness, the apartness” Hollands repeatedly invokes as central to his childhood self, or by his classmates, who carve slurs into his wooden desk. But Hollands is a watcher, too, and the speaker within his poems maintains the power to abruptly shift the frame, to make the move from the boy in his humiliation on the ground to the stranger and more uninterpretable image of girl-as-banana during hang time. This is Hollands’s special trick—to recount not just what he experienced but what he observed: “In my mind / she’s hanging there still in her yellow / uniform against the black dirt / and the pale of the morning sky.”
Mangrove is interested in the past not only for its own sake, but for its interplay with and continual resurgence in the present. Many of this collection’s most excruciating and most lovely poems involve the speaker’s mother, who is observed in some poems from the perspective of the speaker-as-child, and in other poems by the adult speaker looking back in recollection. And yet in all of these poems, from every perspective, the devotion of the son who witnesses yet fails to fully reach or understand the lost, beloved mother rises painfully to the surface, as in the excellent “Cleo in Florida,” when Hollands breaks from a closely imagined observation of his mother shortly before his birth to remark: “your son learned the lyre / from his lovers, that’s true, / but his eye is always on you, / always on a path to you.”
These poems about the speaker’s mother—and, as well, his father, who died of COVID during the early pandemic, and his middle brother, Steve—are complex and complete in their own right, but Mangrove invites even deeper readings by situating them in a collection that also contains descriptions of the speaker now, as an adult with his own family. The Hollands who is a son and brother is also, within Mangrove’s pages, a husband and father, observing his own son now with the same tenderness and thoughtfulness with which he once watched his mother watching him. This is one of Mangrove’s strengths as a collection—the juxtaposition of the father and the son, the little boy Billy and the high school teacher Mr. Hollands, the poet who has remained attuned and dedicated to the habits and emotions of the people of the past as well as the present.
It must be said that Mangrove is, sometimes, just very funny. Only Bill Hollands can begin a love poem with the simply incredible lines “I gave you crabs and you let us / pretend that it might have been / you who gave them to me and that / was so lovely,” and somehow still stick the turn to sincere tenderness at the poem’s end. Throughout Mangrove, Hollands excels at finding lyricism in the conversational and the humorous. He is such a master of weaving casual speech into his poems—“I write about the liberated son / and take my B and call it good”—that one might be forgiven for not noticing, on a first read, his technical precision and deliberate line breaks. Many of the poems take an unassuming form, appearing as long blocks of text that lend momentum to their narrative mode. One gets the sense that Hollands makes these choices thoughtfully, sometimes breaking from his default form to write in a more diffuse and lyrical mode, as in the compact and unsettling “there’s a coldness in me.”
At the end of an early poem that exemplifies Mangrove’s characteristic turning to a memory in part-seriousness, part-reverence, and part-jest, Hollands declares: “the great thing about poetry: you can change the ending.” Yet reading Mangrove, one suspects that Hollands doesn’t really care about the end of these memories as much as their ongoingness—the act of revisiting, of retelling, and of performing the perfect joke at the exact right time. Luckily, in Mangrove, nothing is ever just a joke—even the collection’s title, which can be read as a play on words, also summons for the reader a specific landscape in which many of Hollands’s most tender memories unfold. One starts to feel that time itself might be the punchline: the joke is that the moments and the people that make us into ourselves actually never end, that we never stop watching them.
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