Picture Window: Poems [Paperback]

John Hollander (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 25, 2005

In this deeply philosophical and highly inventive new collection, John Hollander, the distinguished author of numerous books of poetry, offers profound yet playful meditations on the reflective mind and on the words with which we come to know the world. In forms as varied as sonnets, songs, and ancient odes, he muses over the ways we use (and misuse) language as “we grasp the world by ear, by heart, by head / And keep it in a soft continuingness.”

Here, too, are striking verses about the passage of time as recorded by the movement of light and shadow across a surface, whether it be the face of a clock or the enclosed walls of a Hopper painting. Throughout, Hollander delights us with mirrors, palindromes, and strange and surprising reversals that keep the mind ever alert with the challenge “to make words be themselves, taking time out / From all the daily work of meaning, to / Make picture puzzles of what they’re about.”

Donna Seaman has written of John Hollander, “His wise and robustly complex poems span the mind like stone aqueducts or canyon-crossing railroad bridges—awesome works of knowledge and craft, art and devotion.” In this exciting new volume, Hollander shows once again the reach of his poetic imagination.


From the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"We play by ear but learn the words by heart": so explains the first of the many playfully intellectual poems in this strong 18th collection from the much-honored, Yale-based poet and critic. Hollander's considerable reputation rests in part on his wide, often whimsical array of forms, and this volume (more than its recent predecessors) excels in formal agility: blank verse, Sapphics, serial haiku and faithful adaptations from Horace's Latin wheel and spin from comic exclamations (like "pow!" and "blort!") through learned puns, philosophical disquisitions and even "grave accentuations cut in the rind of the earth." Some of the most ambitious poems here describe paintings, while others meditate more abstractly on the relations between seeing and listening, or between writing and visual art. More casual poems address, or remember, particular literary friends (some of them famous): "On a Stanza of H. Leyvick" moves "from the midcentury Village back to the New/ York of the Yiddish poets," while "From a Palace Diary" brings to new heights the poet's longstanding devotion to cats. Recalling both Wallace Stevens and W.H. Auden, Hollander (Tesserae, etc.) combines a reader-friendly alertness with intellectual sophistication; his poems try "to make words be themselves," "to/ Make pictures puzzles of what they're about," and in doing so develop an instantly recognizable take on "the mind's/ Complicating, fragile reflectiveness."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

In his eighteenth collection--in one cleverly constructed and philosophically agile poem after another, some classical in their tropes, others biblical, others echoing Milton, Coleridge, and Stevens--Hollander ponders our habits of perception and our perpetual self-infatuation. In the finely wrought title poem, for instance, one man watches another stand before a plateglass window framing a glorious mountain vista and realizes that the window-gazer is looking not at the landscape but at his own reflection. The poet himself is utterly enthralled by humankind's most alluring invention, language, distracted from contemplating life itself by the complex vibrations of even the humblest of words. Just as our thoughts are inextricably wed to language, he suggests, our vision is cued to the order of art rather than the chanciness of nature. In intricate, mosaiclike poems, Hollander addresses an Edward Hopper painting, the evocations of columns and timepieces, and the piquant nuances of common figures of speech, all the while parsing our impulse to try to make some kind of sense out of everything that comes our way. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (January 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375710132
• ISBN-13: 978-0375710131
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 0.4 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,247,572 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Various styles with different impacts, July 15, 2008

By 

Gary Sprandel (Frankfort, Kentucky) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Picture Window: Poems (Paperback)

These poems are in various style, and for me some work well and others are perhaps too academic, or with too many literary allusions that I missed.
The poems that that work for me are direct with contrasting phrases, like the opening poem "By Heart": "The gossip of swallows, the faint radioed / Reed section of a dance band through an open Window down at the far end of the street". Or "From a Palace Diary"
"My grandfather the wise kind was told by an informed bird -- / A prophetic hoopie ... "The ones that don't work for me, Like Horace Ode II.14, seem intent on loading up with references ... :we have to watch meandering Cocytus and Danaus famous bunch of daughters". Perhaps the poem that works best at combining directness, slightly askew references, and some literary references was "Where it comes from" , with "Searching ever the sources of all the sources,"... and "Any one of our private springs / May be numbered among the most noble fountains / Like one sung of by Horace ... ".