Word: brinnin
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This slim volume is Spivack's first publishing effort, written while she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. She has studied with various well-known poets like John Malcolm Brinnin and Robert Lowell, but their influence is remarkably absent in this collection...
Everything that Brinnin writes about is defunct. The big liners were killed, of course, by the jet plane, a device that condensed the leisured misery of a five-day crossing into seven hours of concentrated nullity or wretchedness. Oddly, however-the same is true of the process that makes frozen orange juice-something was lost in the squeezing. Blush and call it romance...
...Although Brinnin is a registered poet, he finds this quality hard to pin down. But he knows it was there, and even a reader who never saw the Mauretania or the Bremen is inclined to accept his word. One of the narrative's fascinations is that for anyone whose forebears arrived in the U.S. within the past 150 years, a bit of family history is fleshed out. Brinnin is eloquent about the horrors of steerage, and he makes even the magnificence of first class on the old sail-equipped sidewheelers sound impressively grim...
...Brinnin sets it all down, from the packet Savannah, which reached England under sail in 1819 using its steam engine mostly for public relations puffery, to (and down with) the Titanic and the Lusitania, and finally down to (but not with) the excellent but irrelevant Q.E. 2. The author proves again that the sea, at least when perceived from an armchair, is morally instructive. A repeated theme is that of pride brought low. The star of the American-owned Collins Line was the Arctic, an opulent sidewheeler launched in 1850. The ship was four years old when, steaming at full...
...Brinnin's crossing sometimes seems too leisurely. But with his last paragraph, the author succeeds finally in pinning the romance of it all to the page. The Cunard Line's Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth are to be sold and turned into dockside catchpennies. But for one last time, on the Great Circle route between Liverpool and New York, they approach each other and pass in the night. A few middle-aged ship lovers on the Elizabeth think sentimental thoughts as they watch the Mary rush by, while necking teen-agers snicker. "As the darkness closes over...