Description
Poetry. "The last time I saw Holly Prado, whom I'd known forty years, we were part of a group performance of Song of Myself at Beyond Baroque. Now we have her experiment in the long poem, WEATHER, a single, book-length poem in the larger tradition of Whitman's personal epic, presenting the account of a voyage, lasting from fall 2015 to fall of 2018, through the inner seasons of a mythically conscious woman's Los Angeles. In a more specific tradition, Prado's work is in the line of Diane Wakoski, Anaïs Nin, Diane DiPrima, Lyn Hejinian, and other women who have written with wisdom and courage about their resonantly three-dimensional inner lives. Sadly, it is her last book; but a near-compensation is, it is her best. Farthest and deepest in reach, a modernist collage orchestrated by an expressive hand, the poem is open enough to be entered virtually anywhere, yet organically shaped by a mature mythic awareness to have narrative momentum and coherence. Beautifully turned phrases, sentences, and lines abound. An example: 'Out in the huge autumn sky, / leonid meteors give us their message: Don't think too much / of your human pursuits. Don't think you won't be / dissolved in everything wilder than you. Enter / your myths with your open-palmed hands on your knees.' 'Dissolved in everything wilder than you' —that is the state of feeling and vision Prado's imagination makes available to us. It is also the promise all real poetry makes: that our veil of pursuits be lifted, that we see the wild truth.”—James Cushing
Author Bio
Holly Prado (1938-2019) was a member of the LA literary community since the early 1970s. Prado's work, which combines the personal and the mythic with evocative intensity, has appeared in more than a hundred publications and a dozen anthologies, both nationally and internationally. Her thirteenth book, WEATHER, a Cahuenga Press book, was published in 2019. Her book, ESPERANZA: POEMS FOR ORPHEUS (Cahuenga Press, 1998), has been highly praised, particularly in The Women's Review of Books (Wellesley College)—"Prado has, more than any other poet I know, the ability to capture and describe the relationship between interior and exterior worlds in a manner that is simultaneously grounded and filled with mystery," wrote Alison Townsend—and The Chicago Review. Her previous books include poetry, prose-poetry, a novel, two novellas. She taught creative writing, privately, for forty-two years; she also taught poetry in the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC, for twenty years. She was awarded a Certificate of Recognition from the City of Los Angeles, in 2006, for her work in the literary community. Also, Prado was the recipient of the 2016 George Drury Smith Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry, presented annually by Beyond Baroque Literary Foundation in honor of its founder, George Drury Smith. The critic Robert Peters wrote, "Her writing is done, metaphorically speaking, with a unique, knife-sharp edge. Prado is both passionate and visionary."
Author City: LOS ANGELES, CA USA