Holding On Upside Down asks us to look at this savant of looking, a poet who loved performing and purging her papers, who knew how to hide in plain sight. Moore described a jellyfish as “visible, invisible,” which is her own achievement. And like the jellyfish, which opens and closes, invites and resists, looks so silky and packs a sting, she keeps us at a rapt remove. A couple of weeks after meeting Marianne Moore, a young Elizabeth Bishop wrote to a friend: “She is simply amazing. She is poor, sick, and her work is practically unread, I guess, but she seems completely undisturbed by it and goes right on producing perhaps one poem a year and a couple of reviews that are perfect in their way. . . . She is really worth a good deal of study.” As Bishop intuited and Leavell proves, few poets resist and reward patient study as much as Marianne Moore. And if we look at her through the bars of this sympathetic biography, I don’t think she’d much mind.
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 23:50:06 +0000
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