Word: poems
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide. Daddy was its title; its subject was her morbid love-hatred of her father; its style was as brutal as a truncheon. What is more, Daddy was merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bale across the literary landscape...
Death like a Poem. In her most ferocious poems, Daddy and Lady Lazarus, fear, hate, love, death and the poet's own identity become fused at black heat with the figure of her father, and through him, with the guilt of the German exterminators and the suffering of their Jewish victims. They are poems, as Robert Lowell says in his preface to Ariel, that "play Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder...
...friend remembers. "Depression is not the word." For six days she let herself be looked after, but on Feb. 10 she went back to her flat to spend the night. The next morning, in an Auschwitz all her own, she executed what one critic calls her "last unwritten poem." The epithet is appropriate. In the last week of her life she laid bare the heart of her art in a clouting couplet...
...spent the second half of his life answering that question in metaphysical verses of rare power and poignance. In his last published poem, the last one in this volume, he offers with the modesty of a sage a luminous summa of his long religious experience: Little Testament...
Farrell calls his latest literary enterprise a prose poem. It is neither prose nor poem, but it appears to be an attempt to rewrite the first chapters of the Book of Genesis. The first sentence blithers and blathers and blunders along for five pages and 1,390 words. Reading it can only be likened to the experience of a man who, having lost an election bet, has undertaken to eat a pad of Brillo and is wondering which is the more unpalatable-the steel-wool structure or the pink soapy filling. Sample Farrell: "Time moved slowly backwards through more than...