316
PARTISAN REVIEW
style. Popular culture thrives on repetition, formula, sequels, but in the
more restricted art forms we have implausibly high standards of
innovation. Never mind that poetry has a time-honored role as the
repository of persistent values; now it seems we won't count it as worth
saving, we won't allow it to grow old, unless it first is willing to be as
modern as possible. The books reviewed here are not new in Rimbaud's
sense, but they offer a chance for fresh considerations about how a poet
might foster the growth of his mind, and our delight.
John Hollander's latest book is actually the first in a series recently
inaugurated by a university press. In some ways, it serves as a new start
for this poet as well. Seldom has his sensibility been so engaged with a
grave but shapely music. Not that he has put away all the tools of his
wit; there are a few of his usual punning literary allusions, epitomized
by the turning of tag lines (he once referred to young men in a bar as
"half in death with easeful love"); and his more instructive Horatian
decorum and Jonsonian play are still very evident. But this is clearly
his best book-best because its artifice, once so prankish and excessive
it narrowed his appeal, now operates in the service of deep feeling. Yet
all his demonstrative invention has not had to be sacrificed to the more
straightforward measures of a plain style. Some of the book
is
plain;
the "Lyric Interval," a sequence of short lyrics that comprise the book's
middle section, skillfully blends Elizabethan songbook echoes and
more modern, even grimly clipped, tones:
It
is not longing,
It
is all the wideness of dark water,
It
is our quiet
Enislement which makes of this dimmed, distant
Speech a mode of song.
Pervaded with a sense of painful loss and longing, this poetry
never succumbs to self-display or self-pity ("Another Sky" warns
against just these dangers). The masterful title poem, however, is
almost pure joy. The blue wine serves as an excess "signifier," a symbol
whose many possible meanings-it can be read as the totally arbitrary
realm of art, the writer's ink, an impossible but imaginable nature, an
ancestral truth no longer immediately present but active in the
memory-are explored with a wondrous range of tones, from mildly
satiric to mysteriously archaic. Though tightly structured, this volume
is not as keyed with clever puzzles as
Reflections on Espionage,
nor as
exuberantly driven as
The Head of the Bed.
Here, however, there are
