John Hollander

"The first new volume in five years by the distinguished poet-teacher and MacArthur Fellow, of whose last collection, Harp Lake, Harold Bloom has written, "It confirms his authentic eminence, comparable in my judgment to that of Merrill, Ashbery, Ammons and only a few others in his own generation of American poets.""--BOOK JACKET. "The long and very beautiful title sequence, "Tesserae," winds its way through the book, embracing a varied and fascinating collection of lyrics, narratives, puzzles, and translations. It confirms the poet's reputation for dazzling ingenuity, technical brilliance, and erudition of a delightful kind, as when in "The See-Saw" he mocks, by way of nursery rhyme, one of the sillier statements of Hegel: "Of the remedies acting primarily on the body, the see-saw especially has proved efficacious, especially with raving lunatics. The see-saw movement induces giddiness in the patient and loosens his fixed ideas.""--BOOK JACKET. "John Hollander's Selected Poetry is published simultaneously with Tesserae. It provides a generous overview of a marvellous body of work spanning the thirty years from Hollander's first collection, A Crackling of Thorns, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, to Harp Lake, published in 1988."--BOOK JACKET.

A collection of double dactyls canonized by their creator, with an examination of the form's creation.

John Hollander's "Blue Wine and Other Poems," his first collection of verse since the appearance of his new and selected poems, "Spectral Emanations," shows one of our best poetic craftsmen in America moving into a new phase in his distinguished career. Poems on painting and sculpture, in which Hollander examines the static/dynamic interaction of life and art, are balanced against a graceful lyric cycle, which is itself a commentary on the meaning of art songs. The longer poems in this volume--"Blue Wine," "Monuments," "The Train," and "Just for the Ride"--Move beyond Hollander's unique blend of meditative elegance, closely observed detail, and learned wit. They explore even further the realms of mythological vision beyond the boundaries of easy irony. Of the title poem, "Blue Wine," Hollander writes, "I visited Saul Steinberg one afternoon and found that he had pasted some mock- (or rather, visionary) wine labels on bottles, which were then filled with a substance I could not identify. This poem is an attempt to make sense out of what was apparently in them."

With a delicate sense of tragedy and serene lucidity, Rachel Mackenzie, the late fiction editor of the New Yorker, tells the story of the Henderson sisters of Pliny Falls, New York, during the early decades of the twentieth century. Not unlike the characters in Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome and Henry James' The Beast in the Jungle, Martha and Esther Henderson are drawn with an acute sense of perception, courage, and irony which encompasses humanity.

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.

The Work of Poetry is organized into three parts. "Poetic Substance" explores the nature of poetry and the poet, with essays that cover the poet "being-and-feeling-at-home" in his or her work and the parallels between dreams and poetry. Next, "Poetic Experiences" examines the relationship between the poems and the individual, whether a poet or a reader of poetry, through such writings as "Hearing and Overhearing the Psalms," recounting Hollander's poetic childhood, and "My Poetic Generation." The final chapters, "The Work of Poets," deal with the poets themselves, and it is here that Hollander gives insightful readings of the works of Whitman, Robert Penn Warren, and others. Readers who have struggled with the verse of poets like John Ashbery will be grateful for Hollander's masterful readings. They will also discover the enchantment this visionary poet can create from a seemingly dry topic, like the preposition "of," and the clarity he imparts to such contested and ambiguous topics as originality. Serious admirers and students of verse who seek to comprehend its subtleties will find The Work of Poetry a rich and moving source of wisdom.