Eight short lines, four couplets, and a whole holiday is unwrapped. Dave Bonta's "Package holiday" never describes a beach or a hotel. It hands over a few hard-edged phrases and lets us assemble the scene ourselves, much like the trip in its title, except that here the assembly leads somewhere uncomfortable. The central idea is that pleasure bought as a bundle is thin, passive and a little greedy, and the last couplet pulls the floor out from under it by pointing to a life lived underground.
The opening is deliberately strange. "Amber thoughts furnish / a glass discourse." Amber is the colour of sunlight, of honey, of a drink held up to the light. It is also fossilised resin, the substance that traps insects mid-movement. Amber thoughts are warm but possibly stuck. "Furnish" is a household verb, so thoughts become décor rather than activity, like the fittings of a hotel room. A "glass discourse" might be talk that is brittle and transparent, or talk carried on behind glass: a window, a patio door, the rim of a tumbler. Either way, the language is abstract and polished, close to brochure prose, and it keeps the world at a distance.
The second couplet is blunter. "Greed for sun / comes with company." "Greed" is a jolt after all that soft amber, because holidays usually sell themselves as relaxation, not appetite. "Comes with" is the language of sales, as in a room that comes with breakfast or a view, so company arrives as part of the deal. The line also puns. The company can be the tour company that packaged the trip, or the crowd of other people hungry for the same sun. Greed here is shared and organised.
Then the speaker joins in: "we pass the whole day / only being there." The "we" makes the poem complicit rather than superior. "Pass" quietly echoes "glass" from the first stanza. It is the poem's only true rhyme, and it is buried across stanzas, linking the talk behind glass to the way the day is merely passed along like something handed on. "Only" slides between meanings: merely, or as the one achievement. The tourist's accomplishment is presence, the fact of having been there, and nothing is actually done. The day is not spent or used. It is passed.
Formally, the poem is as flat as its subject. There is no rhyme scheme, no punctuation and no capital letters. The lines run to three to six syllables and sound like deadpan statements, as though overheard or read off a leaflet. The equal couplets resemble portions in a package, tidy and identical. That evenness is what makes the ending land. After three couplets of statement, the poem gives a command: "consider how to live / down a mine." The line break puts "down" at the start of the last line, so the poem physically descends. The two poles are even tied by sound, since "sun" and "mine" both end on an *n*, one for surface light and the other for underground dark. Amber is itself something dug from the ground, so the opening image may have been secretly down there all along.
What the mine means is left open, and that is the poem's skill. Judging by the imagery, it could be a reproach: remember the people whose lives are labour in the dark while you lie in the glare. It could also suggest that the resort is a mine of its own, a sealed place where you must learn to live on artificial light and borrowed conversation. "Consider" is polite, almost teacherly, and its mildness makes the command more unsettling. It turns the reader from the speaker's passive "we" into someone asked to think.
That is the poem's significance. In about twenty-five words it exposes the gap between leisure and labour, and between experiencing a place and merely being in it, without lecturing. It also works like the thing it criticises. It is compact and pre-assembled, but its last item is not the souvenir we expected. It is a question about how anyone survives below the surface, and the poem leaves us holding it.