Leavell's account of the life and work of Marianne Moore raised some objections that it was unfair to Moore's mother. The Moore family dynamics were certainly off. But Leavell adds to the case that Moore was one of our most significant American poets.

Moore wrote without regard to labels. She was a Modernist who used a precise syllabic form and rhymes. She was a defender of the underdog, an early white champion of civil rights and of black artists and athletes who also voted Republican and defended LBJ's continuing the Vietnam War, the latter mainly so as not to abandon the South Vietnamese. She wrote "advertising" verse and patriotic poems during WWII. She was raised by lesbians and then denigrated by second wave feminists.

Her poetry must be read and dealt with if you care about American poetry. Her carefully controlled poems were often described as emotionless and overly intellectual. In truth, she was able to contain deep emotion and thought in precise verse, a skill and aesthetic often not practiced or appreciated since the Confessionals came along.

A fascinating biography. No there are no fireworks or is there physical violence. But there is emotional violence and the heroic strength of a small woman with a large vision and poetic craft. ( )

Poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972), her brother Warren, and her mother Mary formed a tight family threesome that stuck together even through Warren's marriage and career up until Mary's death. Marianne lived with her mother for most of her life (her college years at Bryn Mawr were the only notable exception) and insisted that her mother's solicitude allowed her to develop as a writer. If that's true, Marianne paid a high price for her art.

Mary Moore was a manipulative, possessive woman who bound her children to her with long letters, pet names, and secret code words. Remarkably, both Mary and Warren called Marianne "Rat" as an endearment and used masculine pronouns to refer to her. Marianne never married or even developed a deep (read: romantic) relationship outside of her family, although she did count T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Elizabeth Bishop among her literary friends.

Marianne worked outside the home (for several years she was the editor of the prestigious literary magazine The Dial), but her mother sent all the money Marianne earned to a inaccessible savings account. Marianne didn't have a good grasp of financial issues, and she couldn't have gotten at her money if she had wanted to.

Marianne's poetry was the only means of self-expression available to her. This literary woman never even kept a diary for fear her mother would read it.

After her mother's death, Marianne used her freedom to fashion for herself a new persona: a cape-and-tricorne-wearing eccentric maiden aunt, or, as Elizabeth Bishop put it, a "feminine, luminescent, delicate re-incarnation of Paul Revere," (p. 349). In her old age, Marianne toured, read her work to packed houses, and published poems in mass-market magazines. Her popularity peaked around the time of her death in 1972, but after that, interest in her work declined.

Linda Leavell, who was selected by Marianne's surviving family members to write this biography, does an excellent job of integrating analysis of Marianne's poetry with a narrative of her life. It's a little frustrating in parts because of the lack of source material (I really wish Marianne had kept a secret diary). But, if you enjoy literary biographies, this is a good, readable example of the genre, even if in some places it raises more questions than it can answer. ( )