Bread Soup: An Old Icelandic Recipe

I also wanted to respond to Bread Soup: An Old Icelandic Recipe. After first glance, I would definitely say that the poem, as a whole, is rather ordinary. I remember when we first read through it during class; I honestly didn’t even notice how the last several lines were supposed to deviate from the rest of the poem. After reading through it several times, I now see how the last couple lines sum up how one would feel if they ate this soup. The line “will sing inside of you after eating for a long time” seems simple enough but is a perfect description of how delicious warm and tasty soup can be. But in all honesty, I would have preferred a different ending to this poem. I can understand how it does justice to make this poem more into a “poem” and less of an actual recipe, but it just takes way too much emphasis away from the rest of the poem. There is just so much great imagery in the rest of the poem that seems to go unnoticed. Perhaps he could have extended the body of the poem and added more steps to the soup making. But that’s just me.

Holm uses the simplest of words, but they do a fantastic job of creating a vivid image in my mind. For example, consider the phrase “the square heavy loaf;” something about the word “heavy” makes me think of the same dry, dense bread that my family uses in this special Easter Soup every year. That’s another interesting thing about poetry, a writer may be thinking about a particular moment/object when using a particular image, but the reader may look at that image and reminiense about something within their own life; imagery is rather subjective (end of digression…). What I did was, I found an actual recipe for soup (not Icelandic bread soup) and put it alongside this poem. Now obviously there are going to be a lot of differences, but this truly helped me notice how Holm took something as unexciting as a bread soup recipe and made it into a beautifully written poem. Let’s take the use of time for example. In an actual recipe, a certain step would read “soak the bread for 24 hours” or “let the bread age and dry for 30 minutes.” I never really thought about this before but I have never noticed the use of numbers in poetry before. Now that I think about it, the use of numbers and numerical time would seemingly tear the audience away from the poem. Instead he used the phrase “dry for a little” or “soak for a whole day”. It makes obvious how the writer wanted to bring more emphasis to the actual imagery than specifics on how to make Bread Soup; which seems to be the main point of the “How To” poem. Holm also uses metaphor, such as “thick as molasses” to help the poem seem less of a recipe and more of a poem.

One last thought about the “How To” poem is how great it works with recipes. Perhaps I feel this way because the example given is based on a soup recipe, but I did not feel that the topic I wrote about had as many opportunities for creativity as a topic about food would. There are so many more detailed and interesting steps in making food than there are in brushing your teeth (my poem).

----Albert Sementa