Robert Lowell (1917-1977) came from a distinguished Boston family.  Educated at Kenyon and Harvard, he won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer, and the  National Book Critics Circle Award and served as US Poet Laureate.  Considered the founder of confessional poetry, he wrote in both traditional forms as well as free verse.  His marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick, herself a leading writer, essayist, and literary critic, lasted 23 years, and she is the Elizabeth in the title of this slim volume of verse written between 1967-1973.  Harriet is their daughter, born in 1957.  Lowell was seriously affected by bipolar disorder and often hospitalized at McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA.

This book is a selection of poems from his major work, ‘Notebook’.  They are addressed to his wife and his daughter and reference their times together in Maine and Mexico among other places.  The poems are not simple or easy, but the reader is rewarded for the time taken with these complex and often beautiful images.  The first poem is dedicated to Harriet, born January 4, 1957: “Half a year, then a year and a half, then/ten and a half—-the pathos of a child’s fractions, turn-/ing up each summer. Her God’s a seaslug, God a queen/with forty servants, God—you gave up…things whirl/in the chainsaw bite of whatever squares/the universe by name and number. For/the hundredth time, we slice the fog, and round/the village with our headlights on the ground,/like the first philosopher Thales who thought all things water, /and fell in a well…..trying to find a car/key…..It can’t be here, and so it must be there/behind the next crook in the road or growth/of fog—-there blinded by our feeble beams/a face, clock-white, still friendly to the earth.”

Many of these poems compare and contrast youth (reckless, authoritative, ambitious, ripening, thirsty) and aging (mouse brain, freckled, knickered, bronzed by decay) as Lowell regrets the passing years and diminishing abilities, the loss of physical capacity, and the waning of love.  Hardwick and he divorced after 23 years as he went on to his third marriage five years before dying in a taxi cab in NYC.  Not easy reading, but worth the effort.