The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick
New York Review Books, US$18.95 pb, 295 pp
‘Still all air and nerve’
 copy.jpg)
The American poet Robert Lowell (1917–77), I don’t suppose, intended to eclipse his contemporaries, competitors, rivals, wives, any more than in one of his poems the new esplanade along the Charles River intended to stamp down ‘grass and growth’, as he rather vaguely puts it, with ‘square stone shoes’, but it’s what he did. Now, in the almost half a century since his passing, and the end of ‘the age of Lowell’, as one critic christened it back in the 1960s, his largely unintended oppression has unbent; as in the Grimms fairy tale called ‘The Frog King’, one hears the succession of hoops giving way.
Continue reading for only $10 per month. Subscribe and gain full access to Australian Book Review. Already a subscriber? Sign in. If you need assistance, feel free to contact us.
The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick
edited by Alex Andriesse
New York Review Books, US$18.95 pb, 295 pp
