Reviews

An academic poet adept at poeticizing his academic discourse, Hollander addresses the self-referential nature of poetry by considering how devices such as rhetorical questions and answers, imperatives, refrains, lengthy lines, and metaphors of constraint serve to articulate ``poetry's allegorization of its sense of its own nature.'' He compares its differentiation of form from content to philosophy's mind-body problem, but resolves it by arguing for ``the fictive character of form itself.'' Specialists will appreciate the deconstructive readings, while poets will benefit from his crash course in rhetoric. Overall, a lively and enlivening work of criticism. This issue includes a review of Harp Lake, Hollander's latest collection of poems. Ed. Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib.