Jefferson Holdridge

Claude Glass

It seems that if I thrust a finger out
It would tear through the landscape before me.
Plato so disrupts my senses.  Doubt
And the ideal transfigure what I see,
As though it only mirrored scenes that pass,
And like the painters who had followed Claude
Who turned their backs that landscapes in a glass
Transformed the color and perspective in a fraud
Of figurations they cherished more than the real.
It conjured the aesthetic of the beautiful,
Which by then had become a learned way to feel,
With Roman ruins and flocks of promised wool.
The past exhumed through shadows in reverse
For harrow is the root word of a hearse.

Director of Wake Forest University Press and Professor of English at WFU in North Carolina, Jefferson Holdridge is the author of three volumes of poetry: The Sound Thereof (Bradford, UK; Graft, 2017), The Wells of Venice (Eugene: Resource, 2020), and The Bonds of Nest and Urn (Eugene: Resource, 2025). He has been published in Prairie Schooner, Poetry Ireland Review, Southword, The Irish Times, The Anglican Theological Review, Mantis, The Christian Century, The Quint, Honest Ulsterman, The Italian Review, The Galway Review, and Poetry Wales, among other venues. In 2017, he co-edited and introduced Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry with Brian Ó Conchubhair. (WFU Press). Stepping through Origins: Nature, Home, and Landscape in Irish Literature (Syracuse, 2022) is his most recent critical book.