The first words of "Hollow Folk" are a quiet pun. To die "without issue" is, in the language of wills and family trees, to leave no children. The phrase also means "without difficulty," and the poem lets both meanings sit together. The speaker can feel "the forest / thicken within me," as if wilderness grows in a body that may have no heirs, and grows with no effort at all. The title works the same way. A hollow is a small mountain valley, and "hollow" also means empty. The folk who live in one are shaped by the place and perhaps a little emptied by it, so that the land can fill them.
That inner forest is dangerous as well as lush. It builds up "fuel and hunger / for that incendiary spark," and the speaker's imagination turns to fire. "Ah to slash and burn / plow and harrow with my ancestors" is half a sigh of nostalgia and half a confession, since it longs for the old, brutal way of clearing land. Then comes the opposite fantasy, to "cut down the old giants / and replace them with windmills." The word "or" matters here, because the speaker is trying on solutions the way a restless mind does at night. The modern, well-meaning one is no cleaner than the ancient one. Windmills become "deadly flowers scything / the air for migrants," a lovely and horrible image in which a turbine is a bloom and a harvesting tool at once. "Migrants" is left open, and the reader may hear birds first and people second.
Hunger runs under the whole poem as a pattern of eating. Doom is "laid out / like a meal for ravens," and the garden later becomes "a banquet / for slugs and meadow voles." Humans are not outside the food chain, whether they are planning catastrophe or planting beans. The image of "fates intertwining like fingers / at a lovers' leap" adds tenderness to the dread. Fingers laced together suggest intimacy, but "lovers' leap" is the name given to cliffs where people fall. Closeness and ruin share one gesture.
The form is plain on purpose. The poem is twenty-two lines in eleven couplets, with no rhyme and no punctuation apart from an apostrophe, and the only capital letter is the "I." Without full stops the couplets drift into one another like thoughts, and each pair of short lines gives one clear image to hold. The sounds do quiet work too, in the paired verbs of "slash and burn / plow and harrow," the hissing "s" of "scything," and the soft hum in "mountain mint hums." The rhythm stays close to speech, so when the poem gets grand it sounds like a man thinking aloud rather than making a pronouncement.
The turn comes at "a mile and a half up a mountain hollow," when the poem stops theorising and gives an address. The sun now has "green banners," a phrase that suggests light filtered through leaves and makes the forest sound ceremonial. Then the speaker's life is described with dry humor: "I live above a crawl space / too poor for a cellar." After the apocalyptic couplets, this admission of poverty is funny, and it grounds the poem. The grand choices of burning, clearing and rebuilding drop away, leaving a garden that the slugs and voles are eating.
The ending refuses both despair and a tidy lesson. "The wild mountain mint hums / with solitary bees" gives the last word to small, ongoing life. The bees are "solitary," which echoes the childless opening, yet they are busy and not lonely. That is where the poem's significance lies. It admits the human urge to burn, to build and to be afraid, and then quietly shows another way to live in a landscape, as one more creature in the food web, sharing the harvest and paying attention.