MixedThe New York Review of BooksThe autobiography [is] sketchy and scanty because of its subordinate (though controlling) position in the book ... In Rich, the rhetoric of violence is accompanied by a rhetoric of sentimentality, as though, in having chosen to ally herself with a female principle in opposition to a putative male one, she has adopted a language of uncritical deliquescence ... To find language better than that of greeting-card verse to express the sentiments of love is the poet’s task: the rest of us are not equal to it. In lapsing so often into cliché in this volume, Rich has failed her own feelings ... And yet, for all the impatience it provokes, the book has a certain cumulative force, not so much on account of its theorizing as because of its undeniable feelings and its unarguable social facts ... scattered throughout the book [are remarks], which are arresting and provoking ... Too often, the argument here collects only the evidence which seems attractive ... The selectivity of quotation throughout is a fault common to all ideologically motivated writing ... Its value lies in reminding us that different conceptions of motherhood are possible; that motherhood is not necessarily congenial in the same way to every woman; that the \'failures\' of mothers in past generations were often socially caused; that infanticide and abortion are first of all crimes that society has induced women to perform against their own sentiments; that every mother, before she was a mother, was a woman with a body and a mind of her own ... it would have been preferable if the whole book had been as cogent as these remarks.
Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, Ed. by Saskia Hamilton
RaveHarpers... expertly edited and with wonderfully informative footnotes by the poet and scholar Saskia Hamilton, who also provides an alert and balanced introduction ... The Dolphin letters illuminate Lowell’s life and aesthetic perplexities in his later years, but they are equally useful in unveiling Elizabeth Hardwick’s unforgettable role during that era ... For me, the \'lost\' letters testify to Hardwick’s extraordinary depth of character and faithfulness to the past years of love between herself and Lowell ... One cannot but admire Hardwick’s insight into her daughter’s sensibility and gifts ... These letters don’t match the inventiveness of those exchanged by Lowell and Bishop, when each had only to entertain the other and sympathize with troubles from afar. And, at first glance, the voyeuristic interest offered by the living drama of the messages between Lowell and Hardwick almost outweighs their nature as letters. But neither can put a foot wrong in writing a sentence; each has the instinctive cadence of a born writer, the sophistication of an adult who has seen and felt almost too much, the directness and candor of an intimate acquaintance, and the steady capacity for irony even in sadness.
