Marching On

Moving along nicely now through my chunky Collected Poems of Robert Lowell. Finished Life Studies over the weekend, when I could myself drag away from work and reading Ken Follett, and embarked on Imitations from 1961. I'm very familiar with the translations having got hold of the Faber paperback many years ago, but it's interesting how fresh they seem when reading them in the light of all Lowell's poetry. The Villon pieces early in the book seem far more authentically Lowell-ish than actual translations to this reader.

Another particular example of how fresh even the most familiar material can become when read in this context was how startling I found the end of Skunk Hour, which is, of course, the final poem in Life Studies. This has been a favourite poem of mine for many years and I've always loved the ending with its wonderfully affirmatory procession of the skunks into the town, and Lowell's consciousness. But reading it again, directly following the preceding poems, it hit me just how unexpectedly the mother skunk and her column of kittens march into the text itself after we've encountered all those privileged Lowells and their acquaintances and the less privileged inhabitants of the mental wards that Lowell himself had to escape. The animals are so essentially themselves, so other than human, so sane.

I also got a jolt at the stunning confessional line, My mind's not right. I knew it was coming, but it's the first time I've read it in the context of knowing that my own mind wasn't right for a whole slab of 2022. It's a terrible and frightening thing to know, I'm afraid, but my experience of that extreme was relatively short-lived and, I'm hoping, won't be repeated. Poor Cal. He faced that state over and over. And somehow managed to write some of the greatest poems of the last century. Like the skunk who will not scare - quietly astonishing.