Amazon.com (ISBN 0061180114, Hardcover)

In the years since his death in 1965, Randall Jarrell has inspired a wealth of tributes. Robert Lowell and John Berryman commemorated their friend and fellow poet in verse, while a lovely 1967 festschrift included contributions by the likes of Hannah Arendt, Alfred Kazin, Marianne Moore, Maurice Sendak, and Elizabeth Bishop (who recalled that Jarrell "always seemed more alive than other people, as if constantly tuned up to the concert pitch that most people, including poets, can maintain only for short and fortunate stretches.")

Still, none of these homages have quite the intensity or immediacy of Mary Jarrell's Remembering Randall. The author was married, after all, to her subject. And as she relates, their relationship involved a very high level of playful symbiosis:

To be married to Randall was to be encapsulated with him. He wanted, and we had, a round-the-clock inseparability. We took three meals a day together, every day. I went to his classes and he went on my errands. I watched him play tennis; he picked out my clothes. Sometimes we were brother and sister "like Wordsworth and Dorothy" and other times we were twins, Randall pretended.

This isn't, on the other hand, a tell-all. Like her late husband, Mary Jarrell has an old-fashioned and very attractive sense of propriety. So there's no lurid accounting of bedroom behavior, and the author handles her subject's nervous collapse with supreme, sympathetic tact. What we do get is a close-focus portrait of a poet, his personality, and his career. There are many fine insights about the work: "To open Randall's Complete Poems at any page is to find in some degree a Faustian world of disappointment or self-disappointment; and it is to look in vain for that moment so fair that he'd say to it, 'Stay!'" (Her prose, by the way, it itself a kind of tribute to the poet, echoing his mannerisms right down to the Jarrellian ellipsis.) And while Remembering Randall stays pretty firmly focused on the subject at hand, it includes glimpses of fellow authors that no reader will want to miss, like this one-sentence snapshot of Jack Kerouac: "He took no food while he was with us but kept a six-pack of beer always within reach, even carrying one in each hand the day we walked to the zoo." No fan of Jarrell's "The Woman at the Washington Zoo" can read this detail without realizing that one writer's inspiration is indeed another writer's hangover. --James Marcus