134
PAR.TISAN REVIEW
tesserae
that most stay with me reach past the attempt to maintain con–
trol either with wit or with the strong closure that indicates a mastered
perception, even a perception of loss, and arrive at a melancholy accep–
tance which is not quite surrender:
Being no longer made of flax or cotton,
Pages we've written on will soon be rotten,
Just as our gesturing hands will wear away,
Just as our tones of voice will be forgotten.
This calm sadness, subsiding into wisdom, strikes me as Hollander's
undersong. It is not merely a reflection of his sense of general cultural
decline, nor even of his sense of personal mortality, so much as it is an
awareness of the tears of things, an anxious awkward tenderness about
life, a wounded hopefulness which the poet is supposed to know better
than to entertain but which somehow survives everything he knows.
Lest I paint too dark a picture of this book, I point out that it is
brightened by many examples of Hollander's light-handed intellectual
satire. The sonnet "Making Nothing Happen," for instance, turns
Auden's line about poetry into the occasion of a Gnostic myth, in
which Nothing becomes the name of a dark Something which takes the
place of the chaotic "universal blanc-IMange: "
She said,
LeI
there be night
and there was night
Intensest night, within which Nothing might
Be seen emerging from its ruined tomb.
"Early Inscription" mischievously collates imaginary commentaries on
the phrase EIDLLA EW [DNA?] NROBLLA ERAEW (Niemand's
translation: we are all born and we all die), tracing hilarious controver–
sies from the early disputes of Nimmerwahr and Schwarzweiss through
many of the current critical fashions (One of the commentators claims,
"It
is a slippery slope from boasting of the ultimate human knowledge
to asserting, vilely, mankind's hegemony over the 'garden of creation."')
A
Selected Poetry
is an author's autobiography, his attempt to sort
out what seems to have mattered over the years and to connect his sev–
eral ventures into one coherent story. When a poet makes such a volume
he must, like the anthologist, expect to be taken to task for his
"shocking omissions." It is curious what Hollander does leave out: all of
the poems from
Types oj Shape,
all of the verse from
In Time and Place,
and everything from
Riflections on Espionage. Powers
of
Thirteen,
to my
mind not only Hollander's most inventive volume but also his deepest,
