Harp Lake

by John Hollander

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394720512
• ISBN13: 9780394720517
• Release Date: November 1988
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Length: 94 Pages

Customer Reviews

More excellent Hollander.

John Hollander, Harp Lake (Knopf, 1988) Would someone, for the love of pete, please explain to me why, when we have such wonderful formalists running around now as John Hollander, students are still having unbearable pap like Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson crammed down their throats? \ Harp Lake, Hollander's twelfth listed book of poetry here (but he's released more than that; I reviewed one not included in the listing on the dust jacket, Town and Country Matters, a few months back), continues to assert Hollander's easy dominance over the rest of today's scraggly, sparsely-populated formalist world. The man seemingly throws out perfectly shaped little pieces of formal poetry the way Jack Kerouac dropped haiku into casual conversation here and there. "Like a plumber's tools dropped into a box full of glass eyes, Unretractable, the panes of fractured window, jagged, Clear, looking down into black water and scarred cobblestones, Looking out into where we are now..." ("All Our Poems of Death Are Juvenilia") Not to say the master doesn't slip now and then. There's one particular poem in this collection ("By the Sound") that falls so painfully flat it actually hurts to read. My guess is, however, it's a mediocre poem that looks all the more threadbare in relation to those sumptuous things around it; if you popped it into a formalist webzine, for example, it would probably shine out over everything else there like the North Star. English teachers, take note: forget those fools who couldn't tell an elision from a stomach ulcer. This is what formal poetry should be. Read it. Learn it. And for the love of a future generation of poets, please, please teach it. *** ½