In this deeply philosophical and highly inventive new collection, John Hollander, the distinguished author of numerous books of poetry, offers profound yet playful meditations on the reflective mind and on the words with which we come to know the world. In forms as varied as sonnets, songs, and ancient odes, he muses over the ways we use (and misuse) language as “we grasp the world by ear, by heart, by head / And keep it in a soft continuingness.” Here, too, are striking verses about the passage of time as recorded by the movement of light and shadow across a surface, whether it be the face of a clock or the enclosed walls of a Hopper painting. Throughout, Hollander delights us with mirrors, palindromes, and strange and surprising reversals that keep the mind ever alert with the challenge “to make words be themselves, taking time out / From all the daily work of meaning, to / Make picture puzzles of what they’re about.” Donna Seaman has written of John Hollander, “His wise and robustly complex poems span the mind like stone aqueducts or canyon-crossing railroad bridges—awesome works of knowledge and craft, art and devotion.” In this exciting new volume, Hollander shows once again the reach of his poetic imagination.
“Perfection is a rare accomplishment, particularly in American poetry, and the perfection of much of Hollander’s work makes it essential reading for anyone who genuinely cares for the craft of poetry. But in our fallen world we seem fated to value power of perfection, and John Hollander’s poetry has shown a visionary power just often enough to secure him a place as one of the major figures of our moment.” Vernon Shetley, The New Republic
In a major review in The New Republic of John Hollander's two earlier books, Tesserae and Selected Poetry (both 1993), Vernon Shetley said, "John Hollander's poetry has shown a visionary power just often enough to secure him a place as one of the major figures of our moment." Figurehead, a lively, varied, and technically dazzling book, confirms the statement made by Henry Taylor in the Washington Times: "John Hollander revels in technical challenges of unusual severity and complexity, yet most of his poems also have the emotional heft of something worth pausing over and remembering." One of the most gifted of W. H. Auden's choices for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, Hollander has pursued the wide range and metrical brilliance of Auden's own poetry, so that this new book exhibits both a large compass of subject matter (from philosophical matters to personal narrative) and, as usual, some astonishing meditations on paintings--here, by Charles Sheeler, Rene Magritte, and Edward Hopper. By turns witty, touching, profound, mocking, ingenious, and always clever, Hollander's poems are a joy for the reader. He is a modern master.
A glorious new collection from one of our most distinguished poets. Here are poems that explore the ways in which ordinary objects open doors to the more hidden, subconscious truths of our inner selves: a bird of “countless colors” calls to mind “the echo . . . / of an inner event / From my forgotten past”; a subway bee sting conjures up quick unlikely visits by the muses—a momentary awareness that is “as much of a / Gift from those nine sisters as / Is ever given.” Other poems lay bare the imperfect nature of our memories: reality altered by our inevitably less accurate but perhaps “truer” recall of past events (“memory— / As full of random holes as any / Uncleaned window is of spots / Of blur and dimming—begins at once / To interfere”). Still others examine the dramatic changes in perspective we undergo over the course of a lifetime as, in the poem “When We Went Up,” John Hollander describes the varied responses he has to climbing the same mountain at different points in his life. In all of the poems Hollander illuminates the fluid nature of physical and emotional experience, the connections between the simple things we encounter every day and the ways in which the meaning we attribute to them shapes our lives. Like the harmonious coming together of bandstand instruments on a summer afternoon, he writes, most of what we come to know in the world is “A dying moment / Of lastingness thenceforth / Ever not to be.” Throughout this thought-provoking collection, Hollander reveals the ways in which we are constantly creating unique worlds of our own, “a draft of light” of our own making, and how these worlds, in turn, continually shape our most basic identities and truest selves.
In this essay on "what the imagination has made of the phenomenon of echo,” John Hollander examines aspects of the figure of echo in light of their significance for poetry. Looking at echo in its literal, acoustic sense, echo in myth, and echo as literary allusion, Hollander concludes with a study of the rhetorical status of the figure of echo and an examination of the ancient and newly interesting trope of metalepsis, or transumption, which it appears to embody. Centered on ways in which Milton's poetry echoes, and is echoed by, other texts, The Figure of Echo also explores Spenser and other Renaissance writers; romantic poets such as Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth; and modern poets including Hardy, Eliot, Stevens, Frost, Williams, and Hart Crane. This book has implications for literary theory and holds great practical interest for students and teachers of American and English literature of all periods. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.
This book is a collection of pattern poems - poems whose printed format presents a picture of some familiar object that is also the subject of the text. Patterned poems, also called shaped verse, are part of a long tradition that extends from Alexandrian Greek poets to Lewis Carroll and beyond. The poems in this book, written by the poet John Hollander, are on subjects ranging from a beach umbrella and a popsicle to time, love and idea.
Poetry and Music is a passionate and intellectually playful conversation across borders that rethreads long-severed bonds between the two art forms. Hollander's authoritative and accessible criticism guides us through the moments when both modes work in tandem-and leads us to ask why they only sometimes do so successfully. His subjects include hack lyrics in popular music, the effect of setting poetry to music, how music works against enjambment in both metrical and free verse, and musical verse in the works of Donne, Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson, among others.
Demonstrating a poet's imaginative ear and a critic's range of concern, John Hollander here writes about the "melodious guile" of poetry, explaining how poems frame parables about themselves. Hollander considers works by Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, chiefly, plus a range of other poets including Chaucer, Keats, Rossetti, Tennyson, Frost, Stevens, and Auden. He also presents certain poems of his own, showing how they anticipate and exemplify the observations contained in this volume.
This book is a collection of pattern poems - poems whose printed format presents a picture of some familiar object that is also the subject of the text. Patterned poems, also called shaped verse, are part of a long tradition that extends from Alexandrian Greek poets to Lewis Carroll and beyond. The poems in this book, written by the poet John Hollander, are on subjects ranging from a beach umbrella and a popsicle to time, love and idea.
In this major new collection, John Hollander displays the elegance, versatility, and wit that mark him as perhaps the most urbane poet in America. "In Time and Place" features a generous offering of new verse, an extended prose piece, and a series of prose poems previously available only in a rare, privately published edition. The tightly rhymed quatrains of the new poems demonstrate once again the freedom Hollander achieves through mastery of form. The consummate control with which he writes in memoriam to a lost love and a time of absence gives him opportunities to move through dimensions most poets never see. His purgatorial mock-journal—dwelling on loss and gain, on difference and effacement, on places and the place of writing—leads into a sequence of captivating prose poems, where imagination centers on the word and language celebrates its own creation.
The U.S. occupation of Japan transformed a brutal war charged with overt racism into an amicable peace in which the issue of race seemed to have disappeared. During the Occupation, the problem of racial relations between Americans and Japanese was suppressed and the mutual racism transformed into something of a taboo so that the two former enemies could collaborate in creating democracy in postwar Japan. In the 1980s, however, when Japan increased its investment in the American market, the world witnessed a revival of the rhetoric of U.S.-Japanese racial confrontation. Koshiro argues that this perceived economic aggression awoke the dormant racism that lay beneath the deceptively smooth cooperation between the two cultures. This pathbreaking study is the first to explore the issue of racism in U.S.-Japanese relations. With access to unexplored sources in both Japanese and English, Koshiro is able to create a truly international and cross-cultural study of history and international relations.
In Rhyme's Reason, a work that has already become a classic text, the distinguished poet and critic John Hollander surveyed the schemes, patterns, and forms of English verse, illustrating each variation with an original and wittily self-descriptive example.
First Published in 2004. From Philip Freneau to Walt Whitman, Herman Melville to Trumbull Stickney, this collection of two volumes, selected by John Hollander, gives an insight into the artform during the nineteenth century. This collection is sorted by author with focus on American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals. An extensive list of works with attention to their chronology and editor notes on the texts within.
Poet John Hollander surveys the schemes, patterns, and forms of English verse in this classic text, illustrating each variation with an original and witty self-descriptive example. In new essays for this fourth edition, J. D. McClatchy and Richard Wilbur each offer a personal take on why the book has played such an important role in the education of young poets and student scholars. “How lucky the young poet who discovers this wisest and most lighthearted of manuals.”—James Merrill “Marvelously comprehensive, clarifying and useful, and a delight to read.”—John Reardon, Los Angeles Times Book Review “A virtuoso performance and a mandatory text for poetry readers and practioners alike.”—ALA Booklist
This book is a gallery of words and images that celebrates the sister arts of poetry and painting. John Hollander, the eminent poet and critic, has selected more than fifty works of painting, print, drawing, photography, and sculpture, from antiquity to the present, and paired them with poems that have addressed the images in their verses. The result is an illuminating and ingeniously organized chronicle of words and images in conversation, as well as a powerful introduction to how, across Western culture, great writers have been inspired by artists' images. Hollander opens the book with an extended critical introduction to the ecphrastic tradition, and closes it with one of his own poems about Monet's La route de ferme St-Simeon, a moving dialogue between seeing and saying, silence and representation. Lavishly illustrated, this book is a powerful witness to the dynamic relations between the visual and verbal that are at the heart of Western culture.
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