Just Beginning

Before embarking on Lowell's Life Studies this evening, from the chunky Collected Poems, I would have claimed I knew the 1959 book really well. So it was salutary, to say the least, to glance ahead over the collection and realise I've never actually read the prose segment, 91 Revere Street that comprises Part Two, and I'm not so hot on the poems addressed to various other writers in Part Three. Fortunately I genuinely recognised the poems from Part Four (the section actually itself entitled Life Studies) knowing them all very well, and the opening poems of Part One were pretty familiar, so I was not entirely deluding myself.

But now I realise what a mistake it is to think of the book as entirely confessional, Lowell with his jacket and tie off, the wonderful baroque manner of the early poems cast aside. That happens, but gradually, and the opening poem, Beyond the Alps, sort of predicts it, being pretty baroque in itself and sometimes obscure in the old manner. Take the final couplet as an example: Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up / like killer kings on an Etruscan cup. I mean, I love it and think I know why the French capital is black here, and have quite a good idea what an Etruscan cup is, but I still wonder if I'm missing something important out of sheer ignorance.

Having said that, it's the treatment of the Catholic stuff that's suddenly a lot more immediate than the impressive meanderings in The Mills of the Kavanaughs. The brilliant image of the Holy Virgin, risen - at one miraculous stroke, / angel-winged, gorgeous as a jungle bird! is lovely and funny at the same time. Let's face it, the dogma of Mary's bodily assumption, as RL puts it in the useful brief prose intro to the poem, was not exactly the One, Holy, Roman and Catholic Church's best moment of the twentieth century and it's nailed with humour, sympathy and (something there's precious little of in early Lowell) simple humanity.

Gosh, I'm looking forward to the rest of the book!