Like a "tentative, unknown
chord," the atmospherics of Holaday Mason ravel, unravel as hauntingly as Kodaly or Bartok,
marking a lush, iridescent descent into "neither...this world / nor the next, but both." This
lyric realm is evoked through an almost aching precision of image and music, set to flickering
shifts in consciousness and context. As psychologically acute and revealing as they are
simply, blindingly beautiful, these poems invite us into a world in which the ineffable is, in fact,
as sensual as the world of phenomena--which we can revel in, desire and (almost) name.
—Sarah Maclay
The landscape of Holaday Mason's poems is most often a haunted, nocturnal landscape, a landscape of broken dreaming and falling blossoms, of shadows that shift with the wind, an erotic and dangerous and beautiful place. Mason shows us a world that's dark and graceful, full of human doom, and of love. She writes with a breathtaking —sometimes breathless—lyricism, with extravagant passion and with unflinching nerve.
—Cecilia Woloch
Reading Holaday Mason’s Towards the Forest, one feels in the hands of someone driven, someone who knows her way around the interior life of the mind and the imagination, one who takes risks and is brave. There's not a false note or false step, each emotion deeply felt and ringing true. In images memorable and sharp as cut-glass, she lays down her "beauties" in ways that reverberate, leading us to a finish that surprises—like the cop hidden behind the billboard —because we didn't expect truth’s reckoning to be waiting there for us. My impression on first reading this collection and with each subsequent reading was “Wow! This is poetry.”
—Alice Friman
These poems glow like topaz against a half light of dream. Holaday Mason’s first book might easily be her tenth book, so assured is it, so fully in possession of its luminous, nearly hallucinatory terrain. “The Bullet Train,” “Seven Pairs of Swans,” “He Kneels at the Pond Near Ophelia’s Corpse” —these richly sensuous poems, and many others, touch down to a solitude so deep that, paradoxically, it embraces the whole world. In Towards the Forest we find as well our own deepest hungers and wisdom.
—Ann Fisher-Wirth
—Sarah Maclay
The landscape of Holaday Mason's poems is most often a haunted, nocturnal landscape, a landscape of broken dreaming and falling blossoms, of shadows that shift with the wind, an erotic and dangerous and beautiful place. Mason shows us a world that's dark and graceful, full of human doom, and of love. She writes with a breathtaking —sometimes breathless—lyricism, with extravagant passion and with unflinching nerve.
—Cecilia Woloch
Reading Holaday Mason’s Towards the Forest, one feels in the hands of someone driven, someone who knows her way around the interior life of the mind and the imagination, one who takes risks and is brave. There's not a false note or false step, each emotion deeply felt and ringing true. In images memorable and sharp as cut-glass, she lays down her "beauties" in ways that reverberate, leading us to a finish that surprises—like the cop hidden behind the billboard —because we didn't expect truth’s reckoning to be waiting there for us. My impression on first reading this collection and with each subsequent reading was “Wow! This is poetry.”
—Alice Friman
These poems glow like topaz against a half light of dream. Holaday Mason’s first book might easily be her tenth book, so assured is it, so fully in possession of its luminous, nearly hallucinatory terrain. “The Bullet Train,” “Seven Pairs of Swans,” “He Kneels at the Pond Near Ophelia’s Corpse” —these richly sensuous poems, and many others, touch down to a solitude so deep that, paradoxically, it embraces the whole world. In Towards the Forest we find as well our own deepest hungers and wisdom.
—Ann Fisher-Wirth