It's About Time: Collected Lowell

Well, it's taken quite some time, but Frank Bidart and David Gewanter have finally compiled The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. For those not in the know, Lowell died a whopping 26 years ago, and it is only now that the attempt has been made to put together a collected poems volume, even if 'collected' remains an inappropriate term (Land of Unlikeliness is not included for reasons beyond my ken). Lowell, like Eliot, has been the victim of some rather silly academic fuss-budgeting, made indeed a victim for his willingness to to write confessional and political poetry, for having been lauded early in his career, for being seen-- like Ted Hughes-- as a self-absorbed chauvinistic voice, for (basically) the blips of the literary stock exchange.

I'm hoping this edition encourages a reconsideration of Lowell's poetic value. Although, like many, I find more to esteem in his early works-- "The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket," "Skunk Hour," "For The Union Dead," "'To Speak of Woe That Is In Marriage'"-- he's a poet of great power and originality, and he ought not to be thrown out with the literary bathwater. I've not seen the Collected edition, but it's good to know the initial effort has finally been made, and it soundsvery much as if the editors prepared a volume that would be more accessible to undergraduate and non-professional readers.

Click here to read the NYTimes article on the Collected Lowell; and click here to check out basic info on the book from Amazon.com. The Doctor wouldn't mind a copy.... ;-)

Here's Skunk Hour, one of Lowell's most famous poems, and one of his most supposedly confessional -- problematic as that word is in relation to poetry.

Skunk Hour

for Elizabeth Bishop

Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son's a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village;
she's in her dotage.

Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

The season's ill--
we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L.L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet's filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he'd rather marry.

One dark night,
my Tudor ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched the love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town....
My mind's not right.

A car radio bleats,
"Love, O careless Love...." I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat....
I myself am hell;
nobody's here--

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air--
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.