Word: notebook
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...thought I told you never to come here," barks the man at his mistress. The line is a cliche, but then so is the situation. A British salesman, Steve Howard (Rod Steiger), picks up a snippy, nubile hitchhiker named Ella (Judy Geeson). In a little black notebook, Ella has been rating her loves the way a teacher marks her pupils. After a night in a Birmingham hotel, she grants the salesman an A minus, a mark that prompts him to give his wife...
...book is a Life study--but a study which explores far beyond Lowell's personal circumference. In Notebook Lowell is a public poet. He writes: Of politicians and insects, "All excell, as if they were key-note speaker, first of the twenty first-ballerinas in the act, all original or at least in person. . ." Of Clytemnestra, "Orestes, the lord of murder and proportion, saw that the tips of her nipples had touched her toes--a population problem and bad art." Of civilization, power, and Caracas, "through another of our cities without a center, as hideous as Los Angeles, and with...
...NOTEBOOK begins with poems to his daughter Harriet--throughout he invokes her, age 9, 10 1/2, 11, for what she can be, love, and know beyond him--"God as seaslug, God a queen with forty servants, God. . .she gave up--things whirl in the chainsaw bite of whatever squares the universe by name and number." Harriet--outside, in life, sometimes is able to see through "the fog" which her father like "the first philosopher. . .trying to pick up a car key clumsily opaques with his headlights." Harriet appears frequently in the poems--to clarify, identify, be, to be hoped...
After a first reading, Notebook seems to need editing, but with re-reading the book's unevenness is less important. Perhaps the reader learns to use the book, to play with the order and ideas; or with the year in mind the quality and sense of each poem comes to mean the quality and sense of a moment, a day--some flat, banal, moody, hopeful, senseless, surreal, clear, brilliant. And Lowell has the license of the great poet to use dead moments in his designs. The images in Notebook circulate around the poet and his time--describing a curious...
...NOTEBOOK, 1967-68 by Robert Lowell. 161 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...