The Game of Statues Author:Martha Hollander The Game of Statues, winner of the 1989 Walt Whitman Award, introduces Martha Hollander as a poet of remarkable accomplishment and certainity. Presented annually by the Academy of American Poets and judged by preeminent American writers, the prize is this country's most prestigious honor for a first book of poems. — Hollander's w... more »ork draws on an almost classical sense of order and a celebratory study of the material world. Objects shine under her attention: a Venetian blind shot with gold, the oddly threatening forks of a roadside cactus, or the cool pink of a museum's granite floor. Informed by history and myth, these poems grant the shock of recognition. Hollander's hand shakes the known into shape that seem at once rightful and startling.
The collection's title poem establishes the exhilarating quicknesss and clarity of her vision: "...the world lurches and tilts/ with contrasts. with the noise of apprehension/ as it turns you loose again."
And imagination equally capable of transformation and subversion fuels the resonant images of Hollander's work- chilidren playing freeze tag at dusk, pulpy blood oranges rotting before their time. Through their shimmer of assertion and question and a weightless precision of craft, these poems arrive at truth and all its refractions of memory and feeling.« less