Recipes for Gratitude: Poems by Dick Holmes
Charlotte, NC: Pure Heart Press, 2007
See: Dick’s website and Eric’s Anthology
Reviewed by Kendra Crossen Burroughs
Can a man who writes a poem beginning with the words “Edna, your DNA is in the Vedas” be bad? Of course not. Dick Holmes is a walking smiley face of goodness. His poems—all 400-plus of them!—will make you toss back a quaff of the Ocean, play baseball with the Buddha, think about odd or profound things that never occurred to you, and reach for a pencil because you feel as if you could write a poem too, he makes it appear so effortless. This could be deceptive, because Dick seems to know a lot, the result of “tons of personal research,” often while riding his bicycle or communing with nature. He knows when what he had for dinner sounds like a poem, how to woo a gal named Myrtle, and that the Perfect Poem is Meher Baba. One moment he is a tragic poet with large, sad eyes, the next he is a goofy juggler of words or a wise logician that you can’t argue with:
You love nature.
Everything is nature.
Therefore—admit it—
you love everything.
Would you buy a used poem from this man? I guarantee it.