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1 of 1 members found this review helpful“Lowell's last book of poems. Although at times hermetic and stiflingly self-referential, it is a work filled with great sadness and beauty, overcast with the pall of failing health, faltering powers and the poet's imminent death. Lowell's beautiful "Epilogue" proves here to be the best criticism of his great achievement and its limitations:
Lord Manleigh wrote this review Monday, May 4 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
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.
”
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