New Selected Poems Paperback – 28 Feb. 2017

In her long-ish but highly lucid introduction, the editor Katie Peterson says, 'I wanted to hear Lowell's career as a voice, to capture this sense of living in time in a human-scale, lively way. ... But I also wanted to choose poems memorable for their language, not simply the vanishing facts of story. I wanted to show how Lowell remained constitutionally immune to any stultifying permanence either of form or of spirit'. This she does admirably: her edition moves swiftly and discerningly through the early work of Lord Weary's Castle and The Mills of the Kavanaughs (just one selection from the latter), giving a sense of the fledgling Lowell but ensuring readers get reasonably swiftly to the masterpiece, Life Studies, from which she chooses the best poems ('Beyond the Alps', 'For Sale', 'Sailing Home from Rapallo', 'Skunk Hour', etc.) while leaving enough room to include the whole of '91 Revere Street', the prose piece from that book. I would've liked to see a few more of Lowell's Imitations (just three included, and not the best ones in my view) to represent his wide-ranging literary curiosity (especially some Baudelaire translations, given that he republished those poems later in their own illustrated book, The Voyage), but that is a small quibble with an otherwise fine book. After that, Peterson's choices from For the Union Dead are all spot-on, and she gives enough room to the endless blank sonnets of Notebook/History/For Lizzie and Harriet/The Dolphin without allowing them to overburden the selection as a whole. Finally, good choices are made from The Dolphin and Day by Day, and the volume ends with his last poem, 'Summer Tides'.All in all, it's a very impressive book, from its sensible paperback size (240 or so pages) to its index of titles and first lines (not always the case with selected poems). Peterson's thorough but never dull introduction, in which she navigates Lowell's biography (including good, balanced discussion of his privilege and heritage as a well-off New Englander), creative method and reading, and reputation/legacy, is a good starting place for a newcomer; it resists being over-simple, offering thoughts rather than dictating views. The sections which moralize about the modern world (Facebook, Trump, the fetishization of mental-health diagnoses) are a little wearying, but the essay as a whole will appeal to readers new and old.

This selection can probably be considered definitive. Some of the poems are deathless, of course, others (as I am rediscovering) are too numinous for my outlook.