The Complete Light Poems

Poetry. Edited by Anne Tardos and Michael O'Driscoll. The sixty poems in this collection were written over an extended stretch of the poet’s life, beginning on June 10, 1962 and concluding on October 9, 1988, more than twenty-six years later. The poems, then, were begun by Mac Low aged 39 and completed or, perhaps, left off, when he was 66 years old. As the work of an accomplished artist at mid life, the poems express a certain self- confidence and maturity at the same time as they are all too vulnerable in their frank recognition of the frailties of self and love. THE COMPLETE LIGHT POEMS are often very moving. For that reason, and given their intensely biographical nature, the poems afford the reader an unusually prolonged and intimate sense of the poet’s daily life.

I have often wondered where self-referential writing ends and objective observation begins. Endearingly, Mac Low continually invites us into the time and place of his writing. We are, as it were, being let in from the cold: ‘Just me & the cats & and the plants I just took a shower it’s not quite 100 degrees here.’–Anne Tardos