BOO KS
607
But then at night, between the sheets,
He wrongs the girl to right the wrong.
But Mr. Hollander seems to have got so much into the habit of saying
just one thing at a time-however great his style and ingenuity-that
in
his serious poems he seems to go round his points more than he
progresses through them:
Then, if we tremble a little? To understand
Exactly what it means to shiver, when '
What,
We have grown used to the chilly air, is, then,
Perhaps to know that our knowledge of 'What is true
Of the world casts doubt on what we thought we knew
About ourselves, or at least on how it was
We came to know it
...
There is a shadowy area
in
which discursive meditation begins to sound
very like rambling; Mr. Hollander sometimes lingers there longer than
he can afford. There are two other minor irritants in his book: first,
an occasional air of super-cultivation-e.g. good poems with affected
titles and/or Eliot-like quotations at their heads, and sly poems more
about other sly poems than about actual situations; Mr. Hollander is
so clearly well-read that he could easily insist upon it less. Second, he
has rewritten, without quite parodying, poems by Shakespeare and
Marvell. This is simply bad strategy: a poet can usefully rewrite bad
or mediocre poems-it is good exercise, like translating-but when he
goes at the masterpieces he exposes himself to standards which are
hard to survive. These irritants apart, however, Mr. Hollander
is
an
elegant, accomplished technician, with wit and a very good ear, who,
if he does not seem about to write the Great American Poem, might
at least produce a brilliant libretto.
Miss Denise Levertov is said to be the best of San Francisco's Beat
poets. Since the other candidates are Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso
and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, no one will deny her the title. And even
without pushing against that open door, she is a writer of some talent:
Mushrooms firm, coldj
tussocks of dark grass, gleam of webs,
turf soft and croppM. Quiet and early. And no 'Vallery,
no hills: clouds about our knees, tendrils
of cloud in
Dur
hair. Wet scrags
