John Freeman

Great art feels inevitable--so that in the moment of experiencing it, the painting or the dance becomes eternal. We cannot imagine the world before it, or without it.

For many centuries, rhyme was language's highest expression of this imperative. But there is something spooky about it, too. Since most verse is read quietly now, poetry has become a secret ravishment. To hear the rhyme, you have to take the poem inside the echo chamber of your mind and let it reverberate--you need to break down the barrier between you and it.

One need only pick up John Hollander's tidy new anthology of Halloween poems to appreciate why this can feel a little like possession. "I went across the twilit moor," starts out William Vaughan Moody's "The Amber Witch," "Through pine woods purply glimmering,/I heard, not half a league before/The glad sea sing."

In a flash the reader is tromping across some poorly lit field with a feeling that maybe they should have brought a flashlight and a map. Madison Cawein's aptly uses rhyme to propel us through "The Town Witch" toward something downright horrid:

The crone in prison: dragged to court and tried:

Then hung her for a witch and burnt her hut.--

Days after, on her grave, all skin and bones

They found the dog, and him they killed with stones.

Happily, this volume isn't entirely all sticks and stones and broken bones. It actually would make a rather sophisticated substitute for trick or treating--at least for the indoor sort.

Don't care to run house to house, spooked by the darkening hours? Sit down, read the first few lines of Longfellow's "Haunted House" and try not to feel the hair stand up on your neck:

All houses wherein men have lived and died

Are haunted houses. Through the open doors

The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,

With feet that make no sound upon the floors.

"Poems Bewitched and Haunted"

Selected and edited by John Hollander

Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, $12.50, 256 pages

(2005-10-25)

Also by John Freeman

Nonfiction Review
When the Big One occurs, San Franciscans won't be able to say they didn't expect it
(2005-10-18)

Fiction Review
Long before Hurricane Katrina laid waste to New Orleans, the worst natural disaster to befall the South didn't come from Mother Nature but man himself. Or to be exact: one man's army
(2005-10-11)

Nonfiction Review
Ever since he made his debut in 1952 with "Player Piano," a novel about people on a fictional planet controlled by a computer called EPICAC, Kurt Vonnegut has resurfaced every few years to remind us--in fiction or in memoirs--that technology should not be trusted
(2005-10-04)

Rush Hour
In the last decade Americans have watched dumbfounded as the Cold War evolved into the War on Terror. How did this happen? Why did it happen? And who is to blame? Perhaps the most qualified novelist in the world to address these questions is 58-year-old Salman Rushdie
(2005-09-27)

Nonfiction Review
(2005-08-23)

About Face
(2005-08-02)

Fiction Review
(2005-07-05)

Superhero
(2005-06-28)

What I'm reading this summer
(2005-06-09)

Nonfiction Review
(2005-05-31)

Family Guy
(2005-05-31)

Nonfiction Review
(2005-05-10)

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