Amy Lowell: Selected Poems (American Poets Project)

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"The Foxgloves Were Like Tall Altar Candles", 2004-10-10
This new edition of Amy Lowell's poems is a dazzling success in every way imaginable, and I hope people take it up for earnest thanks to the prestige of the Library of America and perhaps of Lowell's new editor, the distinguished memoirist and poet Honor Moore. Moore's introduction to the volume hits just the right notes and she is perhaps the ideal candidate to tell us why we should bother ourselves in the work of one of America's natural-born plutocracy who literally never had to work a day in her life. Despite all her advantages, Lowell was from the first interested in the ongoing "revolution of the word" that Pound, Flint, Hulme and others were promulgating, first overseas and then, bringing it all back home, here in the USA. And Lowell was ready every step of the way, not only with her money but with her amazing talent. Lowell's best writing is scintillating, sharp as anything Pound did in the way of Imagism, and yet she had something Pound lacked, perhaps a heart and certainly an openness to writing about sex experience that Ol Ez shied away from. Ezra Pound could never, for example, have written the poem Honor Moore includes here by Amy Lowell from 1919, called "Balls." At times Lowell and Pound seem to be occupying the same cultural space, as when Lowell proffers her own version of the Ballad of the Fisherman's Wife, and when set head to head, Lowell seems to be, well, not quite as smart as Pound, but in her own way she is just as splendid and her life was terribly cut short when she was still (as these things go) sort of young, and it's interesting to speculate on what would have happened to an American poetry in the 1930s that had Amy Lowell working in it! br / br /The book is very handsomely done and I can't think of anyone who won't walk away from it with a new respect for Amy Lowell, and a renewed puzzlement over the byways of publicity and mania that make Robert Lowell (say) so well known and his cousin Amy (say) kind of a relic from out of the closet.