E. E. Cummings: A Life
*Starred Review* Cheever, the author of discerning books about writers, alcoholism, and problematic sexuality, begins this dramatic portrait of modernist poet E. E. Cummings, of “when the world is mud- / luscious” fame, with her memories of Cummings performing one of his famed readings and of listening intently in the backseat as her father, fiction writer John Cheever, drove the poet, his good friend, back to Greenwich Village. This intimacy shapes her telling of the up-and-down story of this unlikely rebel––a handsome, “flexible and slight,”  rigorously educated “Harvard aristocrat” who discovered “a kind of poetic sweet spot” of scintillating innovation and complex lyric power. Cheever analyzes  Cummings’ subterranean anger, anti-Semitism,  excessive carousing, and flagrant antiauthoritarianism  in France after enlisting during WWI, which landed him in a camp for “undesirables.”  Cheever incisively dissects Cummings’ two disastrous marriages and the shocking abduction of his adored only child, Nancy Thayer, who became an artist and poet unaware of who her father actually was. With Ezra Pound as friend and mentor, Cummings deftly created “wild, expressive syntax” and wielded his signature lower-case “i” as critical response ran hot and cold, and ardent fans left flowers on his doorstep. Cheever’s reconsideration of Cummings and his work charms, rattles, and enlightens in emulation of Cummings’ radically disarming, tender, sexy, plangent, and furious poems. --Donna Seaman