The poet addressing us in “What’s on the Wall,” the first in this group of new poems by John Hollander, speaks from a lifetime’s experience of looking into the mirror, an activity emblematic of poetic consciousness for Hollander. What catches the poet’s eye this time is the blank wall behind him. He sees that blankness as the space in which a painting once hung—an image that, like a text for which his face was the illustration, might have explained “What his life had been about / in the end.” He fills in the blank with semi-comic speculations (might the absent painting have been “A still-life with // Peaches, pears, and plums,” or only “an unreadable / Self-portrait by Death?”). But reflection won’t answer the question he is asking now. For that he must head out “into // The bushes of the / Future from which one cannot / Speak of returning,” somewhere beyond the reach of poems.
Over a long career, which includes 17 books of poetry, beginning with the publication in 1958 of A Crackling of Thorns in the Yale Series of Younger Poets judged by W. H. Auden, Hollander has established himself as one of this nation’s most honored, skilled, and prolific poets. A wisdom poet who likes to make wisecracks, Hollander takes seriously both sides of Horace’s definition of the poet’s task: to instruct and to entertain. Like any poet, Hollander makes language his means to these ends, but language is never only that in his work. Words are also his subject, and reflecting on them is his point of departure for exploring the wonder of the world (and of the mind at work or play in it).
Take “Another Cause for Wonder.” This short poem explores the comic consequences of an adverb being mistaken for a noun. In Hollander’s hands, the maudlin sentiments of an old popular song, “I wonder who’s kissing her now,” disclose a delightfully simple sexual curiosity. As he construes the phrase, “her” is not a direct object but a possessive pronoun, and “her now” is a name for the private part of the body that the singer himself used to kiss. Locating that “now” by contrast to its usual partner, “then,” Hollander notes that “then” can either indicate the “by then” of the future or the “back then” of the past. He concludes that, wherever her “Now” is, it must be between her two “Thens.”
“Still and Yet” plays a related game with those two modifiers. Although nearly synonymous, they are also nearly antonyms, because one describes something continuing (“still”) and the other something in the process of being achieved (“yet”). Together they get at the ongoing irresolution of everyday life, in which we continually “go toward all that will come to be.”
“Still and Yet” and “Another Cause for Wonder” invite us to see the commonest words freshly, animated by an essential strangeness. In “Typing Lesson: A Little Fable,” something similar goes on, but here the cartoon characters are animals, not words. Hollander’s starting point is a stock sentence that helps the typing student learn the place on the keyboard of the letters of the alphabet: “The quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Hollander reminds us that, if our 26 letters can be combined to make that sentence, they can also be re-mixed, forcing us to reconsider fox and dog as other than predictable types. The moral? The truths we thought we knew—and so had stopped thinking about—are always only one way of putting things and are reversible.
The last poem here, an animal fable of another sort, returns to the meditation on last things in the first poem. It takes nine lines in “Toward the End” for the reader to be sure that Jane, “now on her last / legs,” is not a spinster but the poet’s cat. Jane seems to stare at “nothing” just as the poet in “What’s on the Wall” stares at blankness. In the second part of the poem, subtitled “(After the End),” Jane joins that nothingness: she becomes an absent presence and thereby “The shadow of some other kind of shadow,” pointing the poet to the “dark somewhere where our own ends crouched waiting.” Crouching there in what “What’s on the Wall” calls the “bushes / of the Future,” our ends wait for us like a fearsome predator—a great cat, or perhaps something as familiar as a beloved pet.
