The Game of Statues - Hardcover

Martha Hollander

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0871133709 ISBN 13: 9780871133700

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press

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From Publishers Weekly:

In a remarkableused to describe essays, above.eed/i changed above/stet here/pk first volume of poems, winner of the 1989 Walt Whitman Award, Hollander treats us to a highly imaginative array of manner and matter. She weaves tantalizing, curiously humorous narratives, as in "The Detective Examines the Body," where we follow, in Watsonian fashion, a sleuth from crime to solution. Her provocative work may begin in fantasy yet closes with sober reckonings: in "You, Me and the Thing," a threatening creature, "glittering and fanged," is revealed as "our very own." If otherworldly landscapes prevail here, they always serve to illuminate private dreams, as when the moon, seen through a telescope, becomes "the blank heart of our own lone eye." Even when Hollander writes of more conventional subjects--traveling in Europe, art, architecture--she sustains an exceptionally dramatic, often lushly romantic tone. Her poems finally strike us as similar to the Van Gogh canvas she describes in "In the Museum": "That thick stroke, here in life-giving yellow, / there in blue, parodies a caress / that pulls back even as it agitates / and arouses."
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

This accomplished first book, selected by W.S. Merwin for the 1989 Walt Whitman Award, is exceptionally rich in sensory imagery. Attention to detail--light that "sifts" into a room through venetian blinds, girls playing in grass "served up by the platters of their spread skirts"--gives these poems a texture and musicality lacking in much contemporary poetry. A painterly poet, Hollander occasionally overwrites, forcing images to carry too much weight. But she's also rewarding, as in "Accidents," when she lets a skid on ice lead her to reflect on the way "we come skidding/ into the world with a gasp, a yell, a crash" and in the witty "Magnificat," marking "the struggle of counterpoint" in human relations with the admonition to "keep singing." Hollander has made an impressive debut. --Kathleen Norris, Lemmon P.L., S.D.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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