lations.” The poems in the first two sections include recollections of literary friends (Peter Taylor, John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren) and literary former wives (Jean Stafford, who receives a particularly unflattering verse letter, and Elizabeth Hardwick). There is also a handful of pieces about and/or dedicated to some of the other “living names” who figure in the “home-photographs.” All of these poems, too, are shaped by Lowell’s recombinant flashes of memory and whatever autobiographical confabulations they have momentarily brought into focus. Most of them, moreover, are organized around what by now has become a Lowell trademark —the confidential, abrasively intimate second person address (“You lie in my insomniac arms . . .”). The “you” may at times be a close friend, a casual acquaintance, a former wife, a literary figure, but it is never, as it often is in a more communicative poet like Robert Frost, the poor, faithful reader. Lowell, despite inflated critical claims about his public role, has always been an intimidatingly private poet. In Day by Day, the aristocratic Lowell privacy has grown even more awesome, more disorienting. □
AMERICANA
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