Blue Wine and Other Poems (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction)
by John Hollander
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John Hollander's "Blue Wine and Other Poems," his first collection of verse since the appearance of his new and selected poems, "Spectral Emanations," shows one of our best poetic craftsmen in America moving into a new phase in his distinguished career. Poems on painting and sculpture, in which Hollander examines the static/dynamic interaction of life and art, are balanced against a graceful lyric cycle, which is itself a commentary on the meaning of art songs. The longer poems in this show more volume--"Blue Wine," "Monuments," "The Train," and "Just for the Ride"--Move beyond Hollander's unique blend of meditative elegance, closely observed detail, and learned wit. They explore even further the realms of mythological vision beyond the boundaries of easy irony. Of the title poem, "Blue Wine," Hollander writes, "I visited Saul Steinberg one afternoon and found that he had pasted some mock- (or rather, visionary) wine labels on bottles, which were then filled with a substance I could not identify. This poem is an attempt to make sense out of what was apparently in them." show lessTags
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John Hollander has edited several Everyman's Library Pocket Poet volumes, including "Robert Frost", "Christmas Poems", "War Poems", "Marriage Poems", "Animal Poems", & "Garden Poems". He is the A. Bartlett Biamatti Professor of English at Yale University, & the author of numerous books of poetry & criticism. He was made a MacArthur Fellow in 1990. show more (Publisher Provided) John Hollander was born in Manhattan, New York on October 28, 1929. He received a B.A. in 1950 and a master's degree in 1952 from Columbia University and a doctorate in 1959 from Indiana University. He taught at Connecticut College, Hunter College, and Yale University, where he was named Sterling Professor of English in 1995 and retired in 2002. As a young poet, he fell under the influence of W. H. Auden and it was Auden who selected Hollander's first collection of poems, A Crackling of Thorns, for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, which was published it in 1958 with an introduction by Auden. During his lifetime he wrote several collections of poetry including The Night Mirror: Poems, Harp Lake, Tesserae, and A Draft of Light. He also wrote many works of criticism including The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500-1700, Vision and Resonance, The Gazer's Spirit, and The Work of Poetry. He edited the two-volume collection American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century for the Library of America. He died of pulmonary congestion on August 17, 2013 at the age of 83. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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