Volume 49, Number 4 · March 14, 2002
Burning at Both Ends
By Lorrie Moore
Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay
by Nancy Milford
Random House, 551 pp., $29.95
What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay
by Daniel Mark Epstein
Henry Holt, 300 pp., $26.00
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems
edited by Colin Falck
HarperPerennial, 160 pp., $12.00 (paper)
The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay
edited and with an introduction by Nancy Milford
Modern Library, 167 pp., $16.95
The photograph of the mutable Edna St. Vincent Millay that peers out from the cover of Nancy Milford's new biography recalls the face of a Vermeer. But not a Vermeer painted in the likely way—upside down, via camera obscura, so the features and creamy surfaces come together abstractly, with the sweet extraterrestrial look of sainthood or Down's syndrome. The portrait on the cover of Milford's book, despite the tortured Flemish-flapper coif, beneath which sits the elegant bone structure and porcelain finish of a teapot, is mesmerizingly human: Millay's unaverted gaze is seen right side up, captured not as a collection of abstract qualities but as part of the living, breathing features of a complex and elusive woman.
Review, 4563 words
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