THE STATE OF POETRY
495
must both represent and replace what is missing: "For want of you
and readings of / The body's texts, I turn to signs" ("Telling
Fortune").
When Auden contrasts Hollander's traditionalism with his
desire "for the maximum amount of physical diversity," he an–
ticipates the different ways in which
In Time and Place
manipulates
physical signs, particularly the set of signs we call language, in order
to question, even dismantle, time, tradition, and the burden of the
past. At the center of "In Time" is the loss of a "you," perhaps an ac–
tual person, perhaps a muse or fantasy, perhaps some combination
of the two. Hollander addressed the poems of his last book,
Powers oj
Thirteen
(1983), to an ambiguous "you" and may be asking us to read
In Time and Place
as something of a sequel to that volume. But
whereas the earlier book celebrates the relationship with "you," the
later one laments its passing.
The division of
In Time and Place
into three parts, the first
beginning "these still measured lines / Shall wander yet, slowly to
mark / A journey through a kind of dark," cannot help but recall
Dante's pilgrimage. Hollander's journey is, among other things, a
formal one from verse poems to an intriguing prose journal written
in disappearing ink ("In Between") and on to a group of thirty short
sketches or prose poems ("In Place"). Does this formal journey
simply confirm Hollander's desire for physical diversity, or does it
imply some sort of progress, like Dante's journey? An answer of sorts
lies in the epigraph to the volume:
Desire, the Other, Loss , the World of Now and Then, give way
in time to Here and There , the
where's
which mime the
who's
among which we are hurled by virtue merely of being in and
among ourselves: then place will represent the absent face , lost
voices hum in scenes, in seeing itself; as firm lines decompose in–
to grim dust that never sings, their Truth shakes ashes from its
wings and rises once more into prose.
Once again, it is tempting to hear this passage as a variation on a
theme by Stevens: "Life is an affair of people not of places. But for
me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble" ("Adagia"). A
place is individuated space. For Stevens, the individuation of space
into places, which the self can know and call its own, poses a full–
time challenge: "From this the poem springs: that we live in a place /
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves" ("Notes Toward
a Supreme Fiction"). Engaged in the huge ontological and epistemo-
