Kudos to Kenyon

The new issue of Kenyon Review is here and once again editor David Lynn and poetry editor David Baker have given us much to savor. Franz Wright has a wondeful prose poem from the point of view of a girl who has had "a particularly arduous day in eighth grade," and Jane Hirshfield gets under the skin of a vestment: "A sweater takes on the shape of its wearer." A third impressive poem is Paisley Rekdal's "Happiness," surely a more challenging subject than its opposite. The biographer Jeffrey Meyers is prolific and knowledgable and quirky in the best sense, and here he weighs in with an essay about John Huston's movie Freud: The Secret Passion starring Montgeomery Clift and Susannah York. Meyers has great material to work with and does it justice. Even the groanworthy puns ("Cecil's father likes to go driving, but puts the whores before the cart") are enjoyable. Evidently no one liked the movie but it is a fascinating piece of work if only for the dream sequences (in one of which "protestant" turns out to be dream shorthand for "prostitute") and the weirdness of Monty as Freud. -- DL