Fabulists for Our Time

...Age and experience teach us that the very lines we invoked to escape our unsatisfactory circumstances really embody the hard truths of our condition...

...To Hollander, it is the hum of fabrication: Its whole voice gathers up the purest parts Of all our speech, the vowels of the earth, The aspirations of our hopeful hearts Or the prophetic sibillance of song...

...The present poem seems to reexamine the cooled embers, while celebrating a new beloved...

...Believing that American literature is, in its basic Emersonian nature, solipsistic, Hollander seems ever more obsessed with the self-reflexive: "the words that were/Clear glass, through which you could see my well-lit/ Meaning, have all become mirrors or worse...

...several of the poems focus on specific paintings, and one is a dialogue between a sculptor (perhaps the poet's wife) and a storyteller...

...With these new books, John Hollander and James Merrill have metamorphosed into American poetry's most significant fabulists for our times...

...Thus, Jerusalem's timeless quality displays itself most readily at night when "the old/City disrobes and shows off/ Her youth—gently curving breasts/Of a slim body, laid low/ Along a small hill—" as the domes become silhouettes against the sky...

...This is the theme of the recent "Morning Glory" (quoted above) or "Walks in Rome," or the moving "Farewell Performance" addressed to the critic David Kalstone, whose death from AIDS has lately inspired so many elegies from the poets he understood so well...

...In Hollander's homespun myth, the demented potter tosses unusable cups from his wheel...

...When we are young, those of us who love poetry use it as an incantation against all we perceive as vulgar, trivia], unpleasant...

...The title alludes to Lord Elgin's notorious appropriation of the friezes that once decorated the Parthenon, but also to the slang expression for a failure of mental powers...

...Eros flames forth as Merrill's ultimate deity, powerful enough to transform "the very/Here and now" to "a kind of heaven/To sit in, talking, largely mindless of/The risen cloudy brilliances above...

...Auden, yet capable of a poignancy and a wistful sweetness that master of irony would never have found congenial...

...Losing the Marbles" is finally an incandescent acceptance of ourselves, imperfect and aging, yet still able to love and wanting to be loved...

...The poet next branched out into bittersweet episodes from his own experience, and then, in Sandover, to an imaginative autobiography of his emotional life...

...Both Hollander and Merrill have reached a stage of poetic development where they must probe the mysteries surrounding the very act of artistic creation, and the point at which they find a part of themselves to be a product of art...

...Hollander suggests instead that all exist simultaneously, but only because of our delusion that the accomplished supersedes what will come next...

...Merrill first established his reputation as a witty lyricist, rather in the tradition of W.H...

...The Inner Room, with its implication of private recesses of feeling, advances the process of self-exposure...

...Always somewhat classical in his stance, Hollander is a master of those ancient rhetorical devices, parable and aphorism...

...Harp Lake is the Sea of Galilee...

...The Mad Potter" stands as this poet's richest, yet most limpid poem to date...

...Merrill's recent stance has been wryly self-deprecating, in the manner of a magician explaining away his tricks or, in the following case, of a royal abdication: A Poem's giving up its throne For Life, the commoner, At her messy vanity—disposable issues And cleansing screams, her latest instrument To curl the hair...

...The Sense of Unending,' written deliberately in the jangling manner of Edgar Allan Poe, bleakly defines the dichotomy of our despairing sense that there is nothing that is not us, and our hope that perhaps something transcendent exists after all: "So that every life dies/With no comfort at all/In the thought that the skies/Will be canceled, the eyes/Of the world be put out,/And a colorless pall/Cover darkness itself,/Yea, and brightness itself/Bleach away in a shout/Of revision...

...It isameditation on the maker'saltempl to fashion himself...

...In this new collection, a one-act play, "The Image Maker,' concerns a Caribbean Santero who carves figures of Santos: puppets half Catholic saints, half Yoruba demigods...

...Hollander's poems concentrate on the relationship between writing and the visual arts...

...Slowly, this propensity bloomed into allegories about art such as "The Thousand and Second Night," "From the Cupola" (a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth) and "Syrinx" (based on Ovid...

...Hollander loves to exploit paradox for a fresh perspective...

...Harp Lake reproduces a Steinberg drawing, a snow scene by Monet, and Velazquez' "The Rokesby Venus,' each facing a descriptive poem...

...These lumpish efforts are personified in his mind as creatures struggling against his formative efforts, while he looks forward to a time when he will "become/Dumb as those solid cups of hardened mud...

...Both possess the capacity to startle even long-term fans...

...There, an opaque, flat surface seems transformed into a three-dimensional representation of something in life...

...Merrill has always striven, however, to reach beyond nostalgia and memorial...

...Merrill's progress has increasingly revealed him to be a lyric Scheherazade...

...In addition a number of the verses are inspired by popular illustrations...

...Worshipers believe one of these, as patron, can work "to dispel/The dark within them, hears their prayers,/Then maybe says a word on high/To the old Image Maker in the sky...

...A kind of annus mirabilis, 1976 also saw the publication of Hollander's strange Reflections on Espionage, a verse novel in epistolary form about secret agents that was in fact an allegory about poets and poetry...

...The personification of Life at her toilette is vintage Merrill, as are the puns...

...In the concluding section, the poet receives, as a birthday present, "A pregnantly clicking pouch of targets and strikers,/Aggies and rainbows, the opaque chalk-red ones,/Clear ones with DNA-like wisps inside...

...For Merrill, poetry is a love song...

...In this lookingglass universe, the poet wanders about searching for some glimpse of the outside...

...JOHN Hollander has invariably found himself drawn to glassy surfaces...

...The Four Ages," a brilliant example of the former genre, rings changes on antiquity's notion of eras of Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron (a declining order to show how art deteriorates from an initial Edenic experience...

...His gift for the bon mot is especially apparent in his description of Monet's snow covered road as "the truth blocking the path of the obvious"— since what we see is only a chimera of reality through the craft of art...

...For me, the supreme achievement of this latest volume is "Losing the Marbles...

...Moreover, each succeeding book by these authors has provoked a twinge of anxiety, for neither can be neatly classified any more...

...a reminder of Sandover's "GOD BIOLOGY" who rules our destinies...

...Of course, on one level, this is another parable about the poet as creator, and the manner in which artistic efforts often take on an existence of their own...

...Both new books offer insights into their predecessors, but at the same time move toward some redefinitions of position, as if these men felt it incumbent upon themselves to resist any inclination to rest on already won laurels...

...Many critics were caught off guard by the two works, and now regret their stuffy initial reactions...

...Nevertheless, as in Sandover, Merrill actually points to powers of inspiration outside the personal self, a larger and more mysterious imagination, whose intimations we occasionally perceive darkly when they disrupt our trivial concerns...

...The surprises continue in Merrill's 13th verse collection, The Inner Room (Knopf, 95 pp., $16.95), and in Hollander's 14th, Harp Lake (Knopf, 94 pp., $16.95...

...The early work was distinguished by witty fables like the much anthologized "Kite Poem" (which now has the dubious distinction of having been used for the College Board Achievement Tests...

...Although Merrill sticks largely to his original lyric mode, he gives us as well a verse play—somewhat in the Sandover tradition—and a lengthy travel piece set in Japan, written in prose, but interspersed with hokku...

...Yet what seemed precocious, not to say precious, in the juvenilia, now carries a disarming, middleaged confessional quality...

...One, about an engraving that depicts an infant crawling among skulls, prompts the poet to observe that "At our dear, silly games we are the playthings of /Bone dice we don't know t hat we've betted on...

...it might equally serve for Narcissus' pool...

...Such lies/As that All will ascend/At the end of the end/Are what tales are about.' What better trope for the impenetrable mask of illusion could be devised than a painting...

...Suddenly, in 1976, with his seventh book of verse, Merrill swerved into an epic which, two volumes later, culminated in the trilogy now known as The Changing Light at Sandover...

...Those familiar with Merrill's earlier oeuvre will recall that he used to own a home in Greece, associated in his verse with a central love affair, and that it burned down...

...Part autobiography, part fable for our time, the work purportedly deals with communications from demons, angels and dead friends (including Auden) in the Beyond, received by the poet and his longtime companion through a Ouija board...