Shearsman: Belinda Cooke reviews Robert Lowell's 'Collected Poems'

Shearsman 60

Belinda Cooke reviews

Robert Lowell's Collected Poems

Robert Lowell: Collected Poems (Faber and Faber, London, 2003. Edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. 234 x 156mm. 1,216pp, h/c. £40. Isbn 0-571-16340-8.)

In 1987, when I was in Boston researching little-known connections between Lowell and Osip Mandelstam, Frank Bidart told me in an interview that he was preparing a Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Its appearance 16 years later highlights the mammoth task Bidart had set himself. In 1987 Boston was celebrating Lowell's anniversary with many fond tributes by those who knew him. Now as we speed towards his 30th anniversary so many bookshops have winnowed down Lowell's opus to that very slim Faber Selected. After eight years boring friends, family and complete strangers with my Lowell obsession, I also finally deserted him with barely a backwards glance—to the extent that I 'nearly' didn't buy the Collected.

I am grateful that I did. Returning to Lowell's poetry reminds me of Osip Mandelstam's comment that there are many versifiers but few poets. This, if a little harsh, distinguishes between the good and the great. Seamus Heaney's essay title 'Lowell's Command' provides an epithet that illustrates what sets Lowell apart—the right to act as a public voice, earned by the power of the poetry itself, here with lines all too appropriate for 2004:

Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war—until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.

('Waking Early Sunday Morning' from Near the Ocean)

Lowell, when he told Helen Vendler he would have liked his poetry to be described as 'heartbreaking', pinpointed his own voice exactly: how, in the face of the many changes of style, he consistently combines 'confessional', 'heart on his sleeve' utterances, with public statements about the failure of history. Along with his seductive tone, Lowell's poetry draws you in both because of its technical virtuosity and its versatility, reflecting a frightening number of allusions and influences. On being asked about what Lowell had read, Elizabeth Hardwick replied, 'Oh everything! Everything!' Reading Lowell is like being under the influence of a charismatic friend who inundates you with recommended reading.

Frank Bidart, having worked with Lowell in the early seventies on Lowell's various redrafts of Notebook, was the perfect choice to edit the Collected. He makes good use of his inside information in his introduction, which focuses on Lowell's obsessive redrafting. He analyses variants in order to explore the inseparability between Lowell's creative impulse and his need to revise and draws attention to how Lowell viewed variants: 'they both exist'. Elizabeth Bishop is one of the many who noted this trait, movingly captures in her elegy, 'North Haven': 'You can't derange, or rearrange,/your poems again…./The words won't change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.'

There a number of significant features in the book's format. It was initially disappointing to find that the editors had opted to exclude Notebook in favour of History, though Bidart provides a note which has probably managed to pacify most dissenters by focusing on what one loses:

Notebook is less "well-written", perhaps—but, in its freewheeling catch-as-catch-can improvisations, compelling in an entirely different way from History.

One real strength though, is the inclusion of a number of appendices providing translations, variants, uncollected and final poems. In particular, it was great to see the Mandelstam and Akhmatova translations, produced after Imitations and therefore not really out in the public domain. There are also extremely thorough notes discussing variants etc. Finally, Bidart includes an Afterword where he discusses the validity of using the term 'confessional' in relation to Lowell's art. This text has much that is new for someone with all Lowell's individual books.

For the newcomer, reading this text is like attempting to cover Ancient, Renaissance and Risorgimento Rome on a two day trip. Lowell's early poetry is his most difficult but its appeal lies in its sheer consonantal power, such as in 'The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket':'The bones cry for the blood of the white whale,…tears/The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,/And hacks the coiling life out'. One can risk giving the rather heavy and dry The Mills of the Kavanaugh's a miss, but should then wallow in the photographic intensity of the groundbreaking Life Studies, Lowell's own favourite. Lowell provides shocking yet beautiful images as death and the natural world clash head one: Lowell the child encountering his 'uncle Devereux dying at 29 'like a gingersnap man in a clothes-press.', 'Come Winter, Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color,'; Lowell bringing his mother's body back from Italy: 'the whole shoreline of the Golfo di Genova /was breaking into fiery flower'; his own manic depression in 'Skunk hour' with its inexplicable affirmation of skunks in the moonlight against Lowell's mental state, 'my mind's not right'. Imitations then brings to the fore Lowell's ongoing interest in translation with a whole collection of largely European poets. For the Union Dead shows Lowell's language very much paired down. Lowell continues to set personal angst, 'I'm tired. Everyone's tired of my turmoil.' against criticism of contemporary society. The poem to look for is the one of that title inspired by the Colonel Shaw who led the first regiment of black soldiers in the American Civil war. Lowell uses this monument, as he says himself, to discuss, 'evisceration of modern cities, civil rights, nuclear war,…' and as a result, 'the monument sticks like a fishbone/in the city's throat.' In Near the ocean Lowell's switches to Marvellian stanzas and in the process produces the marvellous transcendental 'Waking Early Sunday Morning' with lines such as, 'O to break loose. All life's grandeur/is something with a girl in summer…'

From the late sixties, Lowell obsessively wrote and rewrote free verse sonnets reprinted into various books all of which he saw as valid. The dominant subjects are his own aging, along with commentaries on friends, contemporary events and personal reading. The sonnets are rich in one liners rattled off with a Woody Allen like ease: 'What is History? What you cannot touch.', 'the hand a knife-edge pressed against the future.' The Dolphin, plots the break up of his marriage to Hardwick to marry Caroline Blackwood. He was widely criticised at the time for absorbing Hardwick letters into his sonnets. Now, however, one is struck by the sheer beauty of some of those poems. In his final book, Day by Day, leaving the sonnet form behind, we return to an elegiac calm. Take, for example Last Walk?' as he describes the growing indifference between himself and Caroline: 'seven years, now nothing but a diverting smile,'This volume ends with his superb 'Epilogue' providing yet another of his grandiloquent yet so personal statements about his own quest in poetry—the recording of experience in a way that takes him beyond the word to the Word:

Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

Hats off to Bidart and his co-editors for providing us with this powerful collection.