What do you think?
Rate this book
Picture Window: Poems
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.
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.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2003
1 person is currently reading
10 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 24, 2022
"Strictly speaking" (he then insisted) "these are not - "
(Whatever they were). But when do we ordinarily speak
Strictly: even, say, "I love you" qualifies itself
Always somehow in quotes, like a hedhed cliché,
And not only cliché when it's intended to be
That overdone vulgar lie: otherwise - when it's uttered
Expressively, in the deep conviction that nobody else
Had ever felt quite this way before, a report sadly shattered
By the dumb old words that everyone - liars and airheads and kids -
Eventually must resort to: "I love you," the Leveler.
These days to be truly lofty takes a lot of stunt flying,
Playing slow and loose with the language that we've been given.
Acute as we have, and get, to be, we conclude in nothing
But grave accentuations cut in the rind of the earth.
* * *
An empty tumbler
half filled with the troubled light
of a winter dawn,
the gray out of which
all the blood of darkness had
gradually drained:
it looks like itself
in just the same way that it
looks like other things
- bu not like light, which
cannot look like anything,
although (or because?)
likeness itself is
a part of the shadowing
light sheds on tumblers
at dawn, half filling
them with the stuff appearance
is also made from.
the tumbler, then (half
like some X or Y, half not),
always seems to reign
over itself as
if it, too, were one of its
own subjects, like the
representations
with which the visible world
is always being
refilled, even as
the stuff of representing -
authoritative
black and white - itself
yields definition to the
gray of resemblance.
And all the while like
keeps on coming as close to
is as you can get
- ever hope to get -
philosopher, with all your
whatever it is
that would make this glass
overflowing with glassness
a mere... An only...
* * *
To sing old songs to little children in
A foreign language made intime thereby;
To pose a riddle, putting one more spin
On words to make them twitter as they fly;
To make words be themselves, taking time out
From all the daily work of meaning, to
Make picture puzzles of what they're about
Andthereby keep the constancy in true;
To feel the quivering figure in the rock
Of fact; to know the thrill of the absurd,
Cutting the key with which you might unlock
The chambers of the heart of any word -
These in their faith and hope remain as much
The works of love as all the plays of touch.
* * *
Gleaming in Monday-evening candlelight,
Glass, and plate, and conversation, and good
Fortune then unacknowledged even by
Recognition that it dwelt among us...
We were unencumbered then by the likes
Of hope - a childish thing yet put away
Childishly, or standing in some closet
Shadow like a deceased grandfather's crutch -
Or by the likes of an appraiser's eye
Or hand that might take the measure of all
The wealth of fragilities shadowing
Our years of shining moments then, as if
Someone's hard-edged gold had been laundered and
Smelted, sublimated into golden
Soft light reflected in the faces, the
Wide-eyed minds of such a jeunesse dorée
- George Kateb Stanley Cavell Geoffrey Bush
Noam Chomsky Ed Wilson Marvin Minsky
Marshall Cohen Burt Dreben Ken Keniston
Paul de Man Jaakko Hintikka George Field
Abe Klein Henry Rosovsky Jaan Puhvel
Cal Watkins Steele Commager Frank Pipkin
Jim Kritzeck - and, giving higher light than
Candles, the peculiar lux veritas
Emanates when puzzles at, Renato
Poggioli Harry Levin Crane Brinton
Arthur Darby Nock Van Quine Ed Purcell
Ubi sunt quae ante nos - ubi sumus?
Well, here - wherever that is. An now. Still
Remembering how clueless we were then,
All our tomorrows in the candlelight
Hidden (although the hints in rhymed jingle
About how distant thens would reinvent
Our several shining nows lay all about)
We wonder on about the as-we-were
And as-we-are, and who owed what to whom,
And why the matter of indebtedness
Should seem so much to matter here at all.
Garlands - laurel ivy myrtle olive
Cypress - lurked like shadows of promises...
Promises unbroken? Never quite made
Or kept, because and privilege to
Read aright and understand all its terms;
But - and you showed me this - behind us lay,
Hiding beneath his or her malign stretch
Of no longer picturesque landscape, the
Sleeping giant of what will come to be.
* * *
Like the old pheonix, which, the more it got
Burnt up (recycling its own stuff, no doubt,
For it did not burn down), the more it grew -
Although no fire consumes us, we burn with what
Only the fire of doing can put out
As part of me turns into part of you.
* * *
How can a punishment fit a crime?
What's not ill-suited to a wrong?
The pants will always be too long;
Sisyphus got his overtime,
But how irrelevant! Being light
In a heavy, dark, and wrenching wind
Didn't drape well across the kind
Of shape poor dear Francesca's tight
Little hot games with Paolo frayed,
Sagging, with their braces frayed,
The overkill, the underplayed
Will always have an ugly look.
* * *
Golden does, one fawn,
move among afternoon trees
shading the long lawn
standing as if framed
in some bad landscape painting
still of course untamed
yet seeming somehow
quite domestic, grazing there
like a sheep or cow
not much can disturb;
that the deer have overrun
most of our suburb
follows from our own
civilized interventions
who removed their one
local nature
predator - our hunters - by
limiting the fall
hunting season and
just by being too many
of us on the land.
What had all been farm
went back into second growth
where, quick with alarm
and with fleeting grace,
the deer returned to what now
seemed their native place
when a second tier
of cultivation should have
then displaced the deer
once more, but they grew
fruitful and multiplied as
if after a new
deluge and now reclaim
driveway, summerhouse, and pool
as if they were game
for anything here
in their own third-growth wild.
But a kind of fear
touches me, that they
appear to fear me not, but,
fifteen feet away,
stand and stand and stare,
ears untrembling, curious
but unalarmed there,
irredentist and
innocent of the language
of right and demand.
I could feel it then
better to be living in
a milder time, when
deer such as these three
would start up suddenly, in
healthy fear of me.
(Whatever they were). But when do we ordinarily speak
Strictly: even, say, "I love you" qualifies itself
Always somehow in quotes, like a hedhed cliché,
And not only cliché when it's intended to be
That overdone vulgar lie: otherwise - when it's uttered
Expressively, in the deep conviction that nobody else
Had ever felt quite this way before, a report sadly shattered
By the dumb old words that everyone - liars and airheads and kids -
Eventually must resort to: "I love you," the Leveler.
These days to be truly lofty takes a lot of stunt flying,
Playing slow and loose with the language that we've been given.
Acute as we have, and get, to be, we conclude in nothing
But grave accentuations cut in the rind of the earth.
- Considered Speech, pg. 9
* * *
An empty tumbler
half filled with the troubled light
of a winter dawn,
the gray out of which
all the blood of darkness had
gradually drained:
it looks like itself
in just the same way that it
looks like other things
- bu not like light, which
cannot look like anything,
although (or because?)
likeness itself is
a part of the shadowing
light sheds on tumblers
at dawn, half filling
them with the stuff appearance
is also made from.
the tumbler, then (half
like some X or Y, half not),
always seems to reign
over itself as
if it, too, were one of its
own subjects, like the
representations
with which the visible world
is always being
refilled, even as
the stuff of representing -
authoritative
black and white - itself
yields definition to the
gray of resemblance.
And all the while like
keeps on coming as close to
is as you can get
- ever hope to get -
philosopher, with all your
whatever it is
that would make this glass
overflowing with glassness
a mere... An only...
- Light Glass Still Life, pg. 16-17
* * *
To sing old songs to little children in
A foreign language made intime thereby;
To pose a riddle, putting one more spin
On words to make them twitter as they fly;
To make words be themselves, taking time out
From all the daily work of meaning, to
Make picture puzzles of what they're about
Andthereby keep the constancy in true;
To feel the quivering figure in the rock
Of fact; to know the thrill of the absurd,
Cutting the key with which you might unlock
The chambers of the heart of any word -
These in their faith and hope remain as much
The works of love as all the plays of touch.
- En revenant d'auvergne, pg. 29
* * *
Gleaming in Monday-evening candlelight,
Glass, and plate, and conversation, and good
Fortune then unacknowledged even by
Recognition that it dwelt among us...
We were unencumbered then by the likes
Of hope - a childish thing yet put away
Childishly, or standing in some closet
Shadow like a deceased grandfather's crutch -
Or by the likes of an appraiser's eye
Or hand that might take the measure of all
The wealth of fragilities shadowing
Our years of shining moments then, as if
Someone's hard-edged gold had been laundered and
Smelted, sublimated into golden
Soft light reflected in the faces, the
Wide-eyed minds of such a jeunesse dorée
- George Kateb Stanley Cavell Geoffrey Bush
Noam Chomsky Ed Wilson Marvin Minsky
Marshall Cohen Burt Dreben Ken Keniston
Paul de Man Jaakko Hintikka George Field
Abe Klein Henry Rosovsky Jaan Puhvel
Cal Watkins Steele Commager Frank Pipkin
Jim Kritzeck - and, giving higher light than
Candles, the peculiar lux veritas
Emanates when puzzles at, Renato
Poggioli Harry Levin Crane Brinton
Arthur Darby Nock Van Quine Ed Purcell
Ubi sunt quae ante nos - ubi sumus?
Well, here - wherever that is. An now. Still
Remembering how clueless we were then,
All our tomorrows in the candlelight
Hidden (although the hints in rhymed jingle
About how distant thens would reinvent
Our several shining nows lay all about)
We wonder on about the as-we-were
And as-we-are, and who owed what to whom,
And why the matter of indebtedness
Should seem so much to matter here at all.
Garlands - laurel ivy myrtle olive
Cypress - lurked like shadows of promises...
Promises unbroken? Never quite made
Or kept, because and privilege to
Read aright and understand all its terms;
But - and you showed me this - behind us lay,
Hiding beneath his or her malign stretch
Of no longer picturesque landscape, the
Sleeping giant of what will come to be.
- To Donald Hall, pg. 35-36
* * *
Like the old pheonix, which, the more it got
Burnt up (recycling its own stuff, no doubt,
For it did not burn down), the more it grew -
Although no fire consumes us, we burn with what
Only the fire of doing can put out
As part of me turns into part of you.
- A Mutual Flame, pg. 45
* * *
How can a punishment fit a crime?
What's not ill-suited to a wrong?
The pants will always be too long;
Sisyphus got his overtime,
But how irrelevant! Being light
In a heavy, dark, and wrenching wind
Didn't drape well across the kind
Of shape poor dear Francesca's tight
Little hot games with Paolo frayed,
Sagging, with their braces frayed,
The overkill, the underplayed
Will always have an ugly look.
- Tailor-Made, pg. 53
* * *
Golden does, one fawn,
move among afternoon trees
shading the long lawn
standing as if framed
in some bad landscape painting
still of course untamed
yet seeming somehow
quite domestic, grazing there
like a sheep or cow
not much can disturb;
that the deer have overrun
most of our suburb
follows from our own
civilized interventions
who removed their one
local nature
predator - our hunters - by
limiting the fall
hunting season and
just by being too many
of us on the land.
What had all been farm
went back into second growth
where, quick with alarm
and with fleeting grace,
the deer returned to what now
seemed their native place
when a second tier
of cultivation should have
then displaced the deer
once more, but they grew
fruitful and multiplied as
if after a new
deluge and now reclaim
driveway, summerhouse, and pool
as if they were game
for anything here
in their own third-growth wild.
But a kind of fear
touches me, that they
appear to fear me not, but,
fifteen feet away,
stand and stand and stare,
ears untrembling, curious
but unalarmed there,
irredentist and
innocent of the language
of right and demand.
I could feel it then
better to be living in
a milder time, when
deer such as these three
would start up suddenly, in
healthy fear of me.
- A Kind of Fear, pg. 71-72
Displaying 1 of 1 review