DISTINGUISHED POET AND SCHOLAR JOHN HOLLANDER TO READ

Distinguished poet and scholar John Hollander will give a reading at Bryn Mawr College on Tuesday, Nov. 8, at 7:30 p.m. in the Ely Room, Wyndham Alumnae House.

Free and open to the public, Hollander's reading is part of the College's yearlong Creative Writing Program Reading Series, which features award-winning poets, fiction and nonfiction writers, and playwrights. For more information, please call the Office for the Arts at x5210.

Booklist editor Donna Seaman has written of Hollander: "His wise and robustly complex poems span the mind like stone aqueducts or canyon-crossing railroad bridges — awesome works of knowledge and craft, art and devotion."

A co-recipient of the prestigious Bollingen Prize in Poetry and a former Guggenheim and MacArthur fellow, Hollander has built a reputation for wit and deep learning beginning with A Crackling of Thorns, a collection of his poems chosen by W.H. Auden for Yale University's 1958 Series of Younger Poets.

Since then, Hollander has written 18 books of poetry, including Types of Shape, Spectral Emanations, Powers of Thirteen, Harp Lake, The Figurehead and most recently, Picture Window. Some of his poetry has been set to music by such renowned composers as Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Alexander Goehr, George Perle and Hugo Weisgall. In a major review in The New Republic, Vernon Shetley cited Hollander's Tesserae and Selected Poetry as having shown a "visionary power just often enough to secure him a place as one of the major figures of our moment."

Hollander also has written eight critical books and has edited numerous volumes, among them, Committed to Memory: 100 Best Poems to Memorize, The Gazer's Spirit, Animal Poems, Selected Poems of Ben Jonson and The Essential Rossetti. His two-volume anthology of 19th-century American poetry published by the Library of America in 1993 was described by The Washington Post as that season's "highbrow literary hit," and by critic John Hass as "a work of amazing and quite tactful, almost invisible, erudition."

A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Hollander is currently the Sterling Professor of English Emeritus at Yale.

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