THE EFFECT OF LOSS ON THE LOSER: Review

IMAGINE a poet so confident of his resources that he might begin a book with Tennyson on his mind and end with Rene Char. [John Hollander]'s technical range is well known now. His new book, ''In Time and Place,'' shows how little sense there is in speaking of technique as something separate in a distinguished poet. The first section has 35 lyrics in ''In Memoriam'' quatrains. Some of the best, like ''Orpheus Alone'' and ''A Defense of Rhyme,'' would be memorable in any book, but here they are bright moments in a sustained meditation on a single subject: the loss of a lover, apparently a wife, and the loss of years, memory, abilities - in all, a former life. The approach is extraordinarily indirect. There is the insistence of the tetrameter ABBA rhymes, the little rooms that confine what will be said, but that contain as well the memory of what has passed in those rooms before. There are ''pale tears,'' ''trembling limbs,'' ''coverlets'' and ''dirges'' - words that evoke Victorian proprieties about what should be named - but also those weighty icons of all that literary intellectuals strain to name: presence, absence, the other and distance. Though this marvelous book of poems, prose and prose poems comes from real pain, not literary anxiety, Mr. Hollander's achievement is an imaginative marshaling of very different idioms for pushing loss and pain into understanding. A lover's betrayal, a wife's departure, a friend's death, the mind's decline - Mr. Hollander's idioms keep these figurations of loss overlapping on one another. Although there are passages and short poems of striking description (''Backberry Light'' and ''The Butter,'' for example), this book is remarkable for its naked nostalgia and sentimentality. Early in the book the poet remembers carrying a pail of warm milk through falling snow and knowing ''somehow, that something / important had happened, / and would.'' Somehow and something are not defined; instead the poet kneels before the world tree. This is intended as a book of magical poetry, not as an effort of understanding. But so long as other poets use the idioms of poetry to understand the meaning of their experiences of loss and renewal, no one need settle for magic.