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“... for emphasis. Yet Bidart’s book makes a point and compels an acknowledgment when put alongside Stanley Moss’s Skull of Adam. Bidart’s, one has to concede, is interesting for the human material it contains. Moss’s book by comparison is bland, vacuous, sleek and slack – and the attempt to give it some gravel (poems called ‘Snot’, ‘Shit’ and ...”

“... foreign syntax, but it may in the end be preferable to render Akhmatova in a plain prose version. Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward, however, are highly experienced translators, sympathetic alike to Russian and English requirements. One of her most memorable poems, ‘Lot’s Wife’, four quatrains composed between 1922 and 1924, illustrates the virtues of ...”

“... of his old friend Adrienne Rich, which he dismissed as a feminist outburst. Another old friend, Stanley Kunitz, though admiring the poetry, called it ‘intimately cruel’. Lowell told Kunitz that his valued friend Peter Taylor ‘couldn’t imagine any moral objection to Dolphin. Not that the poem, alas, from its ...”

“... dissecting then reassembling the salient parts. The result in the eyes of doubters, the poet Stanley Kunitz for example, was an art ‘not of transformation but of transposition’, when transformation is art’s proper aim. Transposition of what? Foster begins his book with the pronouncement of the architects Alison and Peter Smithson: ‘Today we ...”

“... and quite a few more in The House on Marshland: she was obviously paying attention to the work of Stanley Kunitz, as well as of Robert Lowell. Formally, too, this early work – thick, stacked diction and taut, chewy syntax – is unlike the plain style that follows: Under cerulean, amid her backyard’s knobby rhubarb squats My cousin to giggle with ...”

“... your face and hear your voice, and take your hand . . .’ (‘In the Mail’) Friends such as Stanley Kunitz and Elizabeth Bishop (who a few years earlier had been dismayed to find one of her own distressed letters to Lowell recycled as a sonnet) begged him not to publish: ‘Art just isn’t worth that much,’ she insisted, asking if he ‘wasn’t ...”

“... that The Dolphin would be a humiliation for Hardwick. ‘Lizzie is the heroine,’ he wrote to Stanley Kunitz, ‘but she will feel bruised by the intimacy. She should win all hearts but what is that when you are left, and left again in print?’ It wasn’t just the appropriation of her correspondence that bothered Hardwick, but ‘the distortion of ...”

“... letters into sonnets without her knowledge or agreement. In April 1971, Lowell mentioned to Stanley Kunitz that he was writing poems about the break-up of his marriage. He was considering publishing them in a limited edition first:That might be the most tactful thing I could do for Elizabeth short of burning the ms. Then in a year or two I’d ...”

“... to write. (‘And now having damned everyone,’ she wrote to Lowell in 1959 after she had dissed Stanley Kunitz and Richard Wilbur, ‘I feel awfully cheered up.’) ‘If you want me to,’ she went on, I’d be glad to give you more benefits of my past experience in Rimbaud-translating. (But of course not if you don’t want me to.) … Sometimes it ...”