Word: truths
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...truth may be more nuanced than many media interpretations suggest, but the public's thirst for immediate analysis and trend identification sometimes prevents it from waiting for pointy-headed academics to reveal their more carefully researched findings...
...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...
...more real than life itself, turning life into a void emptier even than art. Describing an image in a Arachne's web, Hollander claims "That image of her seemed, for too long a moment,/To be even more real than she was herself." Searching for the deepest realm of truth, he moves into layers of representation, "the metaphor within the metaphor,/The thing itself, that very thing" and finds himself caught in a downward spiral of artifice in attempts to locate truth and the perfect language...
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...
Whether Hollander discovers the palace of truth and the place of the perfect language is doubtful: poetry better have a way to go before that happens. And even though Hollander won't make you cry or even sigh, he will awe you with carefully crafted rhythm, intricate rhymes and poems electrified by questions of truth and art. So, yes, I'm saving the pink pen for Plath and Shakespeare and can appreciate Hollander for what he is: a mature experimenter with lots of questions and a very big mind...