Volume 45, Number 12 · July 16, 1998
The Way We Write Now
By John Bayley
Without
by Donald Hall
Houghton Mifflin, 81 pp., $22.00
Going Fast
by Frederick Seidel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 99 pp., $22.00
Ten Commandments
by J.D. McClatchy
Knopf, 104 pp., $22.00
Blizzard of One
by Mark Strand
Knopf, 55 pp., $21.00
On Love
by Edward Hirsch
Knopf, 86 pp., $22.00
Poets must often write to cheer themselves up, and in so doing the good ones can cheer up their readers as well. Thomas Hardy's passionate love lyrics to his dead wife, the wife to whom when she was alive he had paid very little attention for thirty years and more, are also an acknowledgment of himself as he was, an acceptance of what he had done, or failed to do. So moving are these poems, and in a sense so self-delighting, that the reader too feels calmed and blessed at second-hand, endowed while he reads them with the same sort of self-acceptance.
Review, 2903 words
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