Nobody in this untitled poem does much besides read, yet a surprising amount happens. Anselm Hollo marks it only with asterisks, as if it were a fragment of something longer, and it begins by slowing us down: "slowly / the eye scans the page." The adverb gets a line to itself, so we read it slowly too. Reading is described as work done by a body: eye, heart, mind. The mind's reward is oddly physical. It "winces in / in infinitesimal / spasms of / almost pre-natal pleasure." A wince normally signals pain, so wincing with pleasure is a small paradox, a delight so sharp it hurts a little, yet so private it can only be measured in "infinitesimal" units. "Pre-natal" suggests the comfort of the womb, before the world started asking for anything. The doubled "in" at the line break reads like a stutter or flinch. Whether or not it was planned, it acts out the spasm it describes.
Then the view pulls back, and the tone changes. "Down in the street / it is divided / into three parts" sounds like a geometry lesson, and what follows is deliberately flat: "sidewalk, street proper, / sidewalk." Buildings become "large things / of equally inelastic matter," a phrase so stiffly scientific that it is funny. "Inelastic" also sets up a quiet contrast with the mind we have just seen flexing and wincing. The people are "homegrown beings," as if they were vegetables. The voice sounds like a visitor from elsewhere, cataloguing an unfamiliar planet with perfect politeness. Then comes the hinge: "several of whom are reading too." It is the plainest line in the poem, and the most important. The private pleasure of the first stanza turns out to be going on all over the street.
The last movement zooms in as far as it can go, to "so many / silly and loveable cells." Here "karmic revelations" belong to creatures that are really colonies of cells. The word "karmic" brings in the idea of cause and consequence, but Hollo sets it beside "silly," so the cosmic and the comic share a sentence. The affection is real. Nothing here mocks the readers, even though they are being shrunk to biology. The bliss that "feeds / them, and on them, too" is the poem's strangest image. The line break after "feeds" lets us first take it as simple nourishment, and then "on them, too" adds a loop in which the pleasure sustains the cells and also consumes them. Reading, like any appetite, gives and takes at once. The closing "holding them" is ambiguous: it can mean embracing, containing, or binding together, and the poem doesn't choose.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular beat. Its lines are short, and its stanzas vary in length. It has no full stops anywhere, only a colon, commas and a final parenthesis. Its sentences drift on, so it never quite finishes, much like attention itself. The vocabulary mixes registers, setting laboratory words ("infinitesimal," "inelastic," "conjoined") against homely ones ("street," "homegrown," "silly"). That mixture is the poem's temperament: precise and playful, learned and unpretentious.
The ending, "(now turn the page)," is the neatest move. It reads like a stage direction, a bit of deadpan housekeeping after all that bliss. It also catches the reader out. The poem has described an eye scanning, a heart beating and a mind wincing, and these are exactly what the person holding the page is doing now. We were among the "several" reading all along, and the poem has watched us do it. The parenthesis also keeps things moving, since reading doesn't stop at the last line.
The poem matters because it makes an ordinary act visible without making it solemn. It finds wonder in something most of us do without noticing, and it lets us feel both tiny (cells) and enormous (revelations) in the same moment. It does this in under thirty lines, with a joke at the end.