Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...First Cousin Once Removed, a painfully funny and poignant memoir about life in the Boston Brahmin Lowell clan (known best as a family running short on both money and sanity). The book centers specifically on the neurotic and manic depressive genius of Robert Lowell, the Pulitzer Prize-winning confessional poet-cum-activist and titular "first cousin" of the author's mother (hence the author is "removed" from him by one generation). Sarah Payne Stuart '73 treats "Bobby" (as the family called Robert Lowell) as both a biological and literary predecessor, confronting the very madcap hypocrisy running through her bloodline that...
...Stuart is, as hokey as it may sound,necessarily honest to the reader and to herself.From this self-awareness stems her charming wit,uproariously deadpan delivery of madcap WASPmaneuverings and an impeccable sense of comictiming, matched with a poet's (or at leastrelated-to-a-poet's) awareness and a mother'stenderness. She is quick to admit to the bigoted,petty and, yes, manic shortcomings of hermuch-institutionalized family, but just as quickto admit her own shortcomings and accept them all.As this first cousin knows, being neurotic isgood, but knowing you're neurotic is even better
Most beginning poets don't have to face ravenous public curiosity about their private lives and past histories. Frieda Hughes should be so fortunate. The dust-jacket blurb on her first book of poems, Wooroloo (HarperFlamingo; $20), alludes delicately to the author's "unusual literary pedigree," which only fires curiosity while pretending to discourage it. For Frieda Hughes is the daughter of Ted Hughes, Britain's current poet laureate, and Sylvia Plath, whose stunning confessional poems written just before her 1963 suicide made her posthumously famous and, to many, a martyr-saint in the bargain. The Hughes-Plath story...
Wooroloo would be an impressive debut coming from any new poet, but the book will be read by many out of plain curiosity: In what manner does a child of those parents write? And although Hughes denies being consciously influenced by the work of her mother and father, traces from both are easy to see. Her mother's violent, lacerating imagery appears in a poem called "Hysterectomy": "My disease will be stripped out/ Like the rotten lining of a leather coat." Plath's angry confessional tone is echoed in "Granny": "You loved me not, just saw/ A copy...
...happily married to a fellow painter, the Hungarian-born Laszlo Lukacs, Hughes has moved from her property in Wooroloo--the bush fires grew too harrowing--and lives full-time in London. She is pleased to have conquered her own reluctance to appear in print as a poet, despite all the comparisons that await her work. And she wants to concentrate on the future, not her parents' storied past. "I can't ever know the truth," she says of her mother's suicide. "Why would I wish to dwell on it, when there is so much else in life...