Harp Lake - Softcover

Hollander's poetry is mainly concerned with writing itself and with the creation of art in general. And Harp Lake is no exception: it abounds with references to sculpting, painting, writing and, especially, to working with clay. Presumably, Hollander himself is the subject of "The Mad Potter," impressing his pots with " . . . inscriptions / That told a story only when you'd learned / How not to read them. . . . " The Bollingen Prize-winner certainly knows his craft; Hollander's poems demonstrate indisputable technical control. But mere skill cannot carry him to heights of excellence; too often his facility with overused poetic tropes (death, autumn leaves, mirrors) subdues or silences his originality. Hollander at times seems aware of this problem, as "All Our Poems of Death Are Juvenilia" suggestsyet he does little to resist. The poet's self-involvement is another liability here. Although Hollander muses on history and mortality with sincerity and sensitivity, most poems are limited, not extended, by his persona. Women, especially, are rarely more than shadowy figures who frequent bodies of water.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Few poets this side of the Augustan Age could successfully end a poem with six repetitions of the word and, but in his way Hollander is the best 18th-century poet writing today. In love with the technicalities of words and wordplay, he can weave a device like chiasmus, a crosswise placement ("In your reversing yet unlying mirror/ I saw I was I"), into the very substance of a poem. In "To Elizabeth Bishop" he puns relentlessly on the French word for moose ( orignal ) through 20 rhymed tercets. As a collection of formal exemplars, the book is instructive and witty but somehow lacks the shimmer and gravity one finds in the work of fellow formalists James Merrill and Anthony Hecht. This issue also contains a review of Hollander's Melodious Guile, a commentary on poetry. Ed. Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.