'THE BEST AMERICAN POET OF HIS GENERATION'
- TIMEGathered on the occasion of Robert Lowell's one hundredth birthday New Selected Poems offers a fresh & illuminating representation of one of the great careers in twentieth-century poetry The renowned & controversial author of many books of poems plays & translations Lowell was one of the United States' most honoured poets winning the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1947 & 1974 the National Book Award & the National Book Critics Circle Award His ongoing interrogation of his family legacy his personal struggle with manic depression & his mastery of the tradition of poetry in English formed the groundbreaking autobiographical foundation of Life Studies (1959) & the books that followed it including For the Union Dead (1964) Near the Ocean (1967) History (1973) & Day by Day (1977) Katie Peterson's incisive selection of Lowell's poems draws attention to 'the perishability of life its twinned quality of fragility & repetition as framed by the structured evanescence of daily consciousness' Lowell's own intense dramas & struggles are the substrate he drew on in his restless search to make sense of & fix shape-shifting experience
- not his but ours As Peterson says Lowell was 'constitutionally immune to any stultifying permanence either of form or of spirit' Her brilliant new reading of Lowell shows us his work constantly breaking renewing transforming as he strives restlessly over & over to find an elusive unity