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HOLLO'S CORVUS Anselm Hollo, Corvus, Coffee House Press, 1995. 141 pp, $1 1.95, ( paper)
"le plus souvent ils 'agit de tristesse "
it is mostly a question of sadness
the trick's to remember
that that is absolutely no excuse to
be boring
or humorless or too conveniently
absent
(Small Door At Far End)
Anselm Hollo's new book of poems, Corvus, is as "black" and sleek as the raven it's named for. Hollo, in life, dresses most often in basic black, because that is simplifying, an intense, economical- minimalistexpression of taste. Hollo has said often in conversation, "I am a minimalist": he means no waste, no wake of garbage. The changes in his poetry over a long career have been more of mood and depth than of style, as if what is essential to poetry, once mastered in a suitable style, remains constant (faithful) in that style. The same style, or couple of styles, should do. The same body does, the same mind and the same voice. Hollo's reading voice is one of the voices of the poetry times, unforgettably deep and rich, capable of exquisite pacing. It bears no relation to a raven's call whatsoever; it haunts one's reading of Corvus, a book full of resonance across big space and time, big sadness and affection, since one of the things "minimalism" does traditionally is play to the void. Hollo, however, is not inclined to a religion-based exploration of the scale of the cosmos. He is a skeptic, he says in 1991. probably akin to the unnamed "urban ironists" he refers to in West Is Left On the Map. The vastness of space-time is seen not as godly but as what gets between the dead and the living, old times and new times, what separates and devours all humans and their cultures, humans and their cultures tending, especially in these times, to hasten the feast. Hollo is not just a cosmopolite: he is an internationalist, one of American poetry's few and so a treasure. The son of Finnish and German parents, he grew up mainly in Finland speaking Finnish. German, and Swedish. He came to America to stay in the late '60s by way of ten or so years in England and has since made...