David Holper’s Bord för En
At the beginning of the pandemic lockdown, a Swedish pop-up restaurant opened in an open field. There, a basket of food was sent to just one person at a time via cable. Bord för en, Swedish for “table for one,” closed on Aug. 1, 2020.
In his fourth collection of poems Bord för En, David Holper, the City of Eureka’s inaugural poet laureate from August 2019-2021, uses the restaurant as an anchoring metaphor for the collection, conveying both our isolation and the need to be part of the larger world. Whether he’s describing dolomite stones bedded together or pouring bits of bone and ash upon the waters to release one’s father, he reaches deep within to give us rich and harshly beautiful poetry.
The speaker uses that metaphor to explore both the personal and political. In “America is Not a Racist Country*,” while politicians claim America isn’t racist, Holper shows us Breonna Taylor dying in her bed, shot by white police officers, and George Floyd being arrested, white knee on his neck for 9 minutes, 29 seconds, supposedly having no connection with the color of his skin. We’re told genocide against Native Americans was a fluke and, as the speaker tells us, “no one here in the Land of the Free,/ Home of the Brave would stoop so low as to hate someone/ for the amount of melanin in their skin.” That must be some other country “where no black or brown person has to fear/ for their life every time a cop pulls them over/ for absolutely nothing.” In “April Fools,” the speaker describes the pandemic when those who claimed the freedom to go “Unmasked, unvaccinated,” as they “barged in, as if they were/ packing heat, asked for every freedom/ in the till, robbed/ the rest of us blind,” potentially spreading the virus and killing so many for absolutely nothing. Matching that ignorance is the cry in “Connecting the Dots” that “oil gas,/ coal extraction means nothing” while the planet dies “from all we’ve failed to connect right under our/ noses.”
Yet “Klamath River Blessing” celebrates the Klamath running wild again, “Hiking to Hyperion” revels in standing at the base of Hyperion and in “Meseta,” in Spain’s flat plains of abundance, the speaker’s heart awakens “to the whispering spirit.” The speaker in “Superpower” wonders “what it will feel like when the wind lifts you above the past, and love blesses everything from horizon to horizon.” In “North Jetty,” he reaches inside himself and humanity to try to find hope amid despair, “transforming us all in moonlight.” “Ordinary Miracle” tells us of learning from his wife that “love is bigger than all that, bigger than the broken self/ I look at in the mirror, the one I had learned to hate/ because, after all, isn’t that the inheritance my parents offered me.” She taught him, he continues, that “love is fluent in every language, knows where it is wanted,/ which is, after all, everywhere.”
Ultimately, in “North Jetty,” Holper asks what good a poem will do. I answer that in Bord för En, at least, it opens us to the deep pain and rare moments of joy that it is to be human.
Bord för En is available locally at Booklegger Books, Eureka Books and Eureka Natural Foods in Eureka, Northtown Books and Blake’s Books. Holper will sell and sign copies at a book release and reading at the Humboldt Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Bayside on Jan. 17 at 7 p.m. (cash or Venmo only).
Michele Francesconi (she/her) is a retired high school English teacher living in Trinidad.
This article appears in Top 10 Stories of 2025.