NOTES FROM THE CHAPBOOK LOVE LETTER CLUB

From: KIM FAHNER 
To: Hollay Ghadery's 'the blades of grass are dreaming' (Anstruther Press, 2025)

I’m not the kind of person who’s taken in by superficial beauty, but I am the kind who loves beauty in great, holistic depth. The poems inside Hollay Ghadery’s debut chapbook, the blades of grass are dreaming, seem to be synchronous with the painterly beauty of the cover. When you hold this book, there’s a sense of walking into something rich and full of depth as you open its covers to enter the world of the poems. 

These are occasional poems, so they focus on the small and large moments that are encountered in a person’s life, but they are written from the point of view of a neurodivergent poet who lives with existential OCD. As such, these pieces focus thematically on issues of time passing and existence. Each seemingly simple event widens to ripple outwards, inviting the reader to consider life itself. 

The first poem, “Tuesday night love poem,” speaks of the pull between home and evening literary event, how the speaker says, “did it again      said I’d go but” will miss “the warmth of home,” with its “scratch of worn blue/ rug      sigh of dog    give   of cracked leather couch     lamplight     spilling sweet.” The only thing that entices the speaker to even want to consider attending the event is the hope that a friend will be there to offset the discomfort of going alone. 

In “Existential OCD at the Visitation,” which is a poem structured in four parts, the discomfort of a funeral home visit to pay respects to Virginia is documented.  The speaker dissolves in laughter at their father’s comment about someone being next in line for a wake, and I think of every time I’ve dissolved in inappropriate, nervous laughter at a family funeral. Awkward and uncomfortable spaces in a person’s life often seem to be rife for poetic and literary reflection. 

The description of the wake, in the first poem of the sequence, is followed by a reflection on the way time works in the second poem. The speaker says, “we were never promised      any measure of time.” The physical body of Virginia becomes a metaphor for what has passed in the speaker’s life—of “cool Mediterranean tile underfoot      thick/slices of Panettero cake          bottle blonde light falling/slant across a stone bench in a wild garden.” The third poem returns to an observation of people attending the wake, while the fourth one circles around again to consider how Virginia is now metaphorically “a sky weeping stars.” There’s great beauty in this sequence of lyric poems, one that finds its anchor in a philosophical consideration of life, death, and what happens within the span of a human’s life. If we pay attention, the poet seems to be suggesting, the occasions we attend and observe will serve as touchstones of how we look back, but also how we choose to move forward in our own lives. 

Ghadery’s contemplation on mortality is there again in the poem, “The boy who asked me to the prom is d3@d.” In this poem, the speaker thinks back to their youth, citing the “opioid warmth of summer/his earthbound gangle of limbs/the cerulean itch of cloudless sky.” A larger frame of reference—another ripple in the pond, as it were—extends the point of focus to the world and history. In “I’m not supposed to be talking about this,” the speaker contrasts the safety of living in Canada with living in a war zone, says: “it’s not that big a deal     things are different when you’re here    everything is fine/people are living their lives     no blood in the streets     no executions at dawn.” In “Remembrance Day 2024,” there’s a chance to think about how there is “the misconception” that “the past is choked/with poppied fields, crumbling/walls,” and that “the horizon/will always bend/around our children.” 

The final sequence, “I too live with vows,” includes the vivid depiction of a mother waiting for her son outside his graduation dance at night, having been called to pick him up early after having been shooed away earlier in the evening. She wants him to have “this/marvellous now,” but he wants to go home, enters the car, “buckling up/says, There’s nothing/to keep me there.” The turn of the generations makes itself known, making this reader think of how perhaps the younger people now are better able—than adults were then, at that time in their lives—to speak their truths and ask for what they need. 

Thoughts of mortality and of the passing of time weave their way through Hollay Ghadery’s the blades of grass are dreaming. Her close observation and contemplation of specific events in a person’s life offers readers a chance to reflect on their own lives, and Ghadery’s poetic skill is evident with the turn of every page. If anything, by the end of my time with these poems, I only just wanted more of them, so I’m hoping for their inclusion in a future poetry manuscript.