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PARTISAN REVIEW
logical task of placing itself, the self has little left over to give to other
selves; and that, as Stevens sees it, is the trouble. For Hollander, the
individuation of space into places corresponds to, and becomes a
metaphor for, the individuation of people into specific other selves,
which the self can know and love. But, as his use of the
In Memoriam
stanza makes clear, he knows that loving and losing go hand in
hand, and so
in time
places will come to stand for loved ones lost.
The terms of Hollander's journey now become clear. It is a
journey in time through loss to the recognition of significant places
and placements. The final twist he gives his journey is to associate
time with verse and place with prose. The journey toward place then
becomes a journey away from verse. On one level, the lost "you" of
"In Time" may be a lost muse by whom the poet has been deserted.
The final poem, "Shutting Up Shop ," utters its farewell to verse in
terms which pose new questions:
Now , silence for a while, the still
Work of days , loneliness of nights ;
Spilled trivia would choke delights
If
there were any left to kill.
With fluttering heart and no success
Poor Psyche sorted seeds, but sick
Of Love's mad tasks , I turn
to
pick
My way through piles of dailiness.
The moving mixture of sadness and exasperation here would seem
to suggest that the departure from verse reflects defeat, not progress.
In the terms of the epigraph, however, the decomposition of verse
into prose signals not a surrender to the grim dust of unredeemed
dailiness, but rather the phoenix-like recuperation of Truth. The
journey towards prose, then, is a journey towards recognition, ac–
commodation, and regeneration of a world impoverished by loss.
But nothing in Hollander's world lends itself easily to such fixed
formulation. Just as the self-erasing journal of "In Between" comes
back to haunt the writer with his writing, so verse decomposing into
prose returns to reassert itself. For those who can hear in the "prose"
epigraph the singing of three
abba
quatrains,
In Time and Place
is ex–
actly the right book for here and now.
STEPHEN CUSHMAN
