Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
'Dear Don Walacio'
1986 edition of the letters of Wallace Stevens & Jose Rodriguez Feo
A book of letters I co-edited with Beverly Coyle in 1986, Secretaries of the Moon (Duke University Press), found its way into the New York Times Book Review twice after publication. First was Heberto Padilla’s positive review; next was its mention in “Noted with Pleasure”:
https://media.sas.upenn.edu/afilreis/Secretaries-of-Moon_review_2-8-1987.pdf
https://media.sas.upenn.edu/afilreis/Sec-of-Moon_in-Noted-with-Pleasure_NYT-1986.pdf