Tesserae [signed]

The first new volume in five years by the distinguished poet-teacher and MacArthur Fellow, of whose last collection, Harp Lake, Harold Bloom has written, "It confirms his authentic eminence, comparable in my judgment to that of Merrill, Ashbery, Ammons and only a few others in his own generation of American poets."The long and very beautiful title sequence, "Tesserae," winds its way through the book, embracing a varied and fascinating collection of lyrics, narratives, puzzles, and translations. It confirms the poet's reputation for dazzling ingenuity, technical brilliance, and erudition of a delightful kind, as when in "The See-Saw" he mocks, by way of nursery rhyme, one of the sillier statements of Hegel: "Of the remedies acting primarily on the body, the see-saw especially has proved efficacious, especially with raving lunatics. The see-saw movement induces giddiness in the patient and loosens his fixed ideas."John Hollander's Selected Poetry is published simultaneously with Tesserae. It provides a generous overview of a marvellous body of work spanning the thirty years from Hollander's first collection, A Crackling of Thorns, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, to Harp Lake, published in 1988.