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Robert LowellThe poetry of Robert Lowell—blueblood, madman, and once toast of all Po-town—recently enjoyed a renaissance with the release of a definitive Collected Poems. His early poems are notable for their formal austerity and their tapioca-thick gravitas, his later ones for a looser, confessional tone of suffering and self-aggrandizement. Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath took a now-legendary seminar with Lowell in Boston in their early years as writers. Anne reported that she learned little from her gruff, uncommunicative teacher and that, in fact, it was her confessional work that influenced him. The scenario is likely. Just about any poem from Lowell’s late volume Notebook could be quoted below and “Redskin” will certainly do. Here the poet describes his wife’s sunburned skin. Her breasts (“headlights,” ugh) have not been crisped. Despite the automotive imagery, she is “Woman” and therefore natural, more natural than a male whose equipment is reminiscent of that used in our National Sport. Renoir and Michelangelo horn in. Then the sound of rain reminds the poet of clawing fingernails, not a bad image, but when he turns it around and compares his wife’s fingers to trickling rain, the effect is risible. The poem ends with an orcan image unsupported by the rest of the poem.
UntitledUnsheathed, you unexpectedly go redskin,except for two white torches, fruits of summer, woman’s headlights to guide us to the dark, love of the body, the only love man is. Woman looks natural in herself, not man, equipped with his redemptive bat and balls— Renoir, paralyzed, painted with his penis, did naked women, not Michelangelos. Rain claws the door, a thousand fingernails; your icy, poorly circulating fingers trickle all night from heaven to the skin; they will be warm by day, and we be warm— at wrath-break, when the earth and ocean merge, who wants to hold his weapon to the whale? 
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