Picture Window: Poems

Hollander, John

ISBN 10: 1400040078 / ISBN 13: 9781400040070

Published by Alfred A Knopf Inc, New York, 2003

About this Item

Stated first edition; pale blue dust jacket with some edge wear and light soiling; pale blue cloth with light brown cloth spine; pages clean, bright, and unmarked. Seller Inventory # 001254

Bibliographic Details

Title: Picture Window: Poems

Publisher: Alfred A Knopf Inc, New York

Publication Date: 2003

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Very Good++

Dust Jacket Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis:

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.

About the Author:

John Hollander is the author of seventeen previous books of poetry. His first, <b>A Crackling of Thorns</b>, was chosen by W. H. Auden as the 1958 volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He has written eight books of criticism, including the award-winning<b> Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse</b> and<b> The Work of Poetry</b>, and edited or coedited twenty-two collections, among them <b>The Oxford Anthology of English Literature</b>, <b>American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century</b>, and (with Anthony Hecht, with whom he shared the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1983) <b>Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls</b>.<br><br>Mr. Hollander attended Columbia and Indiana Universities and was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows of Harvard University. He has taugh