It's taken me more than a year to complete the big Collected Poems of Robert Lowell, and I mildly celebrated this morning when I read the final poem. If nothing else, it's good to be able to move on.
To be honest my encounter with the full works of the great poet has been an odd one. Enough great poetry to easily prove that greatness, but a fair amount of the simply baffling. Just this morning I was grappling with a sonnet sequence intended for Notebook that I don't think ever saw publication and I had no idea what it was about. Then a short piece entitled Kaddish, a lyric originally intended for Bernstein's 3rd Symphony of the same name, which struck me immediately as quite brilliant. (As these things do, that sent me for a listen to the actual symphony, which I've never heard before, but I could only handle the 1st movement. Just too much drama to take in and a spoken narration that struck me as way over the top. A pity that Lenny didn't use RL's words - his exuberance might just have been reined in.)
But I was faced with a bit of a conundrum after finishing the tome in question. What to move onto? The answer came in the form of Ted Hughes's Collected Poems for Children. Yes, I'm opting for pure pleasure for a month or two or three. It's time for the brow to unfurrow.
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