Review of Figurehead and Other Poems by John Hollander.

Witty and highly interactive, these new poems in John Hollander's Figurehead (his seven-teenth book of poetry) recall the sumptuosly inventive and playful work in two of his earlier books: Types of Shape (1969) and Reflections on Espionage (1976).

All kinds of punning, visual and verbal, abound in this new book, underscoring Hollander's theme of "double-dealings / With ourselves. . . ."There is a long poem about hyper-realist Charles Sheeler's The Artist Looks at Nature (painted in 1943)-a poem about a painting which is itself about painting. Hollander even treats us to a retelling of Browning's "My Last Duchess."

And he delights in all kinds of rhymes and slant rhymes in the manner of Lewis Carroll or Gerard Manley Hopkins, like this sequence in "Getting from Here to There": dawn, darn, dark, dirk, disk, dusk.Every poem is a "modeled fable / of something occurring in the mind." Required for all larger collections.

--Dan Guillory, Library Journal, March 1999

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