By John Hollander
An excellent new assortment from one in all our such a lot individual poets.
Here are poems that discover the ways that usual gadgets open doorways to the extra hidden, unconscious truths of our internal selves: a chicken of “countless colors” calls to brain “the echo . . . / of an internal occasion / From my forgotten past”; a subway bee sting evokes speedy not going visits through the muses—a non permanent expertise that's “as a lot of a / present from these 9 sisters as / Is ever given.”
Other poems lay naked the imperfect nature of our thoughts: truth altered via our necessarily much less exact yet maybe “truer” remember of previous occasions (“memory— / As choked with random holes as any / Uncleaned window is of spots / Of blur and dimming—begins instantly / To interfere”). nonetheless others research the dramatic adjustments in standpoint we suffer over the process a life-time as, within the poem “When We Went Up,” John Hollander describes the various responses he has to mountaineering a similar mountain at various issues in his life.
In the entire poems Hollander illuminates the fluid nature of actual and emotional adventure, the connections among the easy issues we come upon on a daily basis and the ways that the which means we characteristic to them shapes our lives. just like the harmonious coming jointly of bandstand tools on a summer time afternoon, he writes, such a lot of what we come to understand on this planet is “A death second / Of lastingness thenceforth / Ever to not be.”
Throughout this thought-provoking assortment, Hollander finds the ways that we're regularly developing specific worlds of our personal, “a draft of light” of our personal making, and the way those worlds, in flip, regularly form our most elementary identities and truest selves.