The Fading Smile

August 1, 1994
``There's a strange fact about the poets of roughly our age, and one that doesn't exactly seem to have always been true,'' observed Robert Lowell in a letter to Theodore Roethke in 1963. ``It's this, that to write we seem to have to go at it with such single-minded intensity that we are always on the point of drowning.'' In this memoir, poet and Houghton Mifflin editor Davison traces the connections that linked a large, dynamic and, at times, self-destructive group of American poets--Lowell, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath among them--for five years as Boston experienced its ``second poetic renaissance.'' Separate chapters discuss individual poets, and the author writes evocatively, too, of his own strivings during that same period in the Boston area. But the main interest of the book is the way Davison follows the writers' complex interrelations, fostered by teachers (John Holmes), institutions (the Poets' Theatre of Cambridge), proximity, choice and chance. This is a personal and vivid portrait of a literary moment and its community. Photos not seen by PW.

August 1, 1994
This is a sad book, its gloom relieved only by the author's intimate knowledge of and tenderness toward the dozen Boston-based poets he knew as colleagues and friends. Most of these writers were oppressed by gender roles, sexual anxiety, too much drink, and too many cigarettes, so much so that one begins to suspect that these personal crises arose at least in part from a larger, historical one. In an epigraph, Janet Malcolm writes, "The nineteenth century came to an end in America only in the nineteen-sixties," and Davison's poets give every impression of participating in some painfully restrictive ethos that is about to die. The poets even looked alike; in the photographs, the men, at least, all seem to be made out of the same dour ingredients: crew cut, dark suit and tie, Buddy Holly glasses. From a terrible time came beautiful poetry, and Davison alone, like Melville's Ishmael, lived to tell the tale.-David Kirby, Florida State Univ., Tallahassee

August 1, 1994
Davison grew up with poetry in his blood since his father, Edward, was a poet and a teacher with close friends such as Robert Frost. Davison not only became a poet himself, but also a highly successful book and poetry editor for several distinguished houses including Atlantic Monthly Press and Houghton Mifflin. Already established in the publishing world at age 28, he left New York, which he loathed, for Boston in 1955 and immediately found himself part of the shimmering enclave of young poets destined to transform American poetry for all time. The first person Davison contacted, in fact, was Sylvia Plath, with whom he had a brief but motivating romance. In this modest, anecdotal memoir, he describes his friendships with Plath and nearly a dozen other poets, including Richard Wilbur, W. S. Merwin, Maxine Kumin, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Robert Lowell, and Stanley Kunitz. These profiles offer the flip side of some familiar tales, as well as fresh images of this intense, often depressed, always ambitious group. Davison's narrative, inlaid with poetry, serves as an interesting anatomy of a literary movement. For more on Lowell, watch for a review of Paul Mariani's forthcoming biography in the September 1, 1994 issue of "Booklist." ((Reviewed August 1994))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1994, American Library Association.)