Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works
Starred Review. In her enlightening forward to this newest gathering of avant-garde poet Mac Low's work, Tardos makes the case that Mac Low (1922-2004) had an over-arching interest throughout his career in creating things of beauty, a bombshell of a statement considering Mac Low's oeuvre, made up in large part of Zen-inspired chance experiments and ungainly language clusters like Ugolino, / re oN rlin / Dysentery / Eille eZzato paRently. Mac Low's work has always been interesting, but beautiful? This collection, which follows two previous selections, does the best job to date in providing a window into Mac Low's unique perspective on what constitutes poetic beauty, showcasing a wide range of his poetry, from earnest political juvenilia to concrete-poetic text experiments, and featuring the previously less represented work Mac Low did in his last 20 years. Mac Low's more personal, less overtly process-generated, lyrics reveal the modernist and Romantic roots of Mac Low's sensibility. No. no. no. Hear! The between, he wrote in 1946 in Hear I here, laying out his lifetime preoccupation with betweenness. Mac Low continued to listen dutifully until his death. This book provides a rewarding testament to his ability to transcribe what he heard.(Jan.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.