61...NOT YOUNG, exactly, but a good twenty years short of what a healthy person can expect nowadays. And this will be the last collection, I guess, at least the last overseen by Brock-Broido herself. Four makes for a slender corpus (Ashbery 28, Merwin 24 and counting, Graham 13 and counting), but four is all we had of Elizabeth Bishop, too, and four is plenty if they are all as strong as Brock-Broido's. Not a dud in the lot--scarcely a dud poem, even, in any volume.
Did she just not write many poems, or did she have extremely high standards for what she allowed to go into print? Are there stacks of not-quite-there poems that might eventually get published, as in Bishop's case? Or, as in Eliot's case, are the poems that got published just about all that got written?
Will there be a collected poems, including those she published after Stay, Illusion? That seems a safe bet. Will there be a biography? A definitive critical study? Those possibilities seem less likely, but Bishop's reputation grew immensely after she died, and I can see the same thing happening in Brock-Broido's case.
At least I hope it does.
There's something deeply unfashionable about her work, something unapologetically mandarin in its syntactical complexity, its range of allusion, its music (she liked to pull out quite a few stops), its interlacing with poetic tradition, its distance from the confessional or topical (not that the confessional and topical are absent).
But is being deeply unfashionable a bad bet so far as posterity goes? Hardly.
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