BOOKS
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few poems that don't contain one of these complex words (in the
Empsonian sense): all, shadow, mirror, and memory. "All" recurs to
demonstrate a gathering of considerations; the poet moves towards a
philosophical stance, a love affair with generality: "what all shall come
to
for us." The recurrence of shadows displays the questioning that
drives the book's desires: "Moments of astonishing shadow." We
occasionally witness the narci ism associated with mirrors, but more
often these objects represent the problems of doubling and interiority:
"The Thing in th.e mirror neither greeted me nor reproached." And
memory operates everywhere: in the many kinds of doublings, in a
witty poem on "Deja Vu," in the sense of a lover departed but still
painfull y present:
Along the wet walls outside the bare trees
I wait and decide not to walk now
In the cold park, but that ghost of me
Who would have gone your way enters there.
Tropes of thought and feeling unite the book with two central notions:
the dialectic of dark issuing from li ght (and vice versa), and the sense of
our future selves evolving out of our present limitations. The first
preoccupation dominates Hollander's visual sense, and fills the poetry
with shadows and chiaroscuro, hidden depths and revealing surfaces.
The second concern provokes melodies of loss and promise, insight
and ighorance. The final poem in the book, "Nox Regina," draws both
concerns together; it builds on an urgent questioning addressed to the
mythical lady of the darkened world: "Why does she permit ..
.I
Dark–
ness to be so full! Of possibility[?]" Why is her rule so indecent, the
poet complains, and the answer comes with star-struck ambiguity:
-Oh she is lonely and
Her many eyes, dimly
Turned down on us as if
Glimmering, all are blind.
For Hollander, poems are like those "bottles of blue wine," and what
he does with them is clearly what he desires his ideal reader to do: "he
may take some drops home with him/ In the clear cup of his own eye,
to see what he will see." This is a book about seeing and being on the
look-out-for, and at its best it is boldly and subtly written, with "the
common inks of! Day and night."
The careful control and tender feeling Hollander achieves com-
