Word: figurehead
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...there are many princesses in Europe, none of whom ever came close to capturing the popular imagination the way she did. Princess Grace of Monaco was perhaps the nearest thing, but then she had really been a movie star, which surely provided the vital luster to her role as figurehead of a country that is little more than a gambling casino on the southern coast of France. The rather louche glamour of Monaco's royal family is nothing compared with the fading but still palpable grandeur of the British monarchy. To those who savor such things, British royals...
...does not move me. His poems are not verses that romance-filled 16-year-olds also reading The Bell Jar will dog-ear and gloss with pink pens. No "how-do-I-love-thees" cling to Hollander's pages like damp, juvenile kisses. Hollander's newest book of poetry, Figurehead, insulted my delicate romantic sensibilities at first with its apparent lack of poeticized emotion and what seemed overly intellectual, self-conscious and anal attention to grandiose metrical dexterity, complete with a hyper-inflated vocabulary that rivals Webster...
Using poems of metrical dexterity that are filled with wit, subtle humour and a vast vocabulary, Hollander brings many common poetic themes to light in Figurehead in admittedly startling forms. Experimenting with various meters, dictions and forms, Hollander's poems continually strive to discover, in the process, the perfect poetic language (or what Hollander terms "the back room of meaning...
...search for the original language, the purest language of poetry, inevitably leads Hollander into age-old questionings about the line between art and truth. The really fascinating (and even kind of moving) poems in Figurehead express a powerful anxiety over the duel power of art to both display and destroy truth. Art, Hollander claims, is not only an "'expression'/ of pain and longing, of delight and hope," but also is a physical power in and of itself, intimately connected with physical pain and destruction. Hollander continually focuses on the ultimate emptiness of all art. He obsesses over the power...
Obsessed with stripping away levels of reality through poetic form and controlled language, Hollander looks at art from as many directions as possible in order to get at the truth. In the last part of Figurehead, Hollander moves into evocative poems describing particular works of art (Edward Hopper's "Sun in an Empty Room" and Charles Sheeler's "The Artist Looks at Nature" are two paintings Hollander interprets poetically), effectively enfolding a work of visual art within his own poetic representation and creating Figurehead's most visceral and visually evocative poems...