The Game of Statues - Hardcover

In a remarkableused to describe essays, above.eed/i changed above/stet here/pk first volume of poems, winner of the 1989 Walt Whitman Award, Hollander treats us to a highly imaginative array of manner and matter. She weaves tantalizing, curiously humorous narratives, as in "The Detective Examines the Body," where we follow, in Watsonian fashion, a sleuth from crime to solution. Her provocative work may begin in fantasy yet closes with sober reckonings: in "You, Me and the Thing," a threatening creature, "glittering and fanged," is revealed as "our very own." If otherworldly landscapes prevail here, they always serve to illuminate private dreams, as when the moon, seen through a telescope, becomes "the blank heart of our own lone eye." Even when Hollander writes of more conventional subjects--traveling in Europe, art, architecture--she sustains an exceptionally dramatic, often lushly romantic tone. Her poems finally strike us as similar to the Van Gogh canvas she describes in "In the Museum": "That thick stroke, here in life-giving yellow, / there in blue, parodies a caress / that pulls back even as it agitates / and arouses."
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This accomplished first book, selected by W.S. Merwin for the 1989 Walt Whitman Award, is exceptionally rich in sensory imagery. Attention to detail--light that "sifts" into a room through venetian blinds, girls playing in grass "served up by the platters of their spread skirts"--gives these poems a texture and musicality lacking in much contemporary poetry. A painterly poet, Hollander occasionally overwrites, forcing images to carry too much weight. But she's also rewarding, as in "Accidents," when she lets a skid on ice lead her to reflect on the way "we come skidding/ into the world with a gasp, a yell, a crash" and in the witty "Magnificat," marking "the struggle of counterpoint" in human relations with the admonition to "keep singing." Hollander has made an impressive debut. --Kathleen Norris, Lemmon P.L., S.D.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.