I often read Jarrell. This book with its picture of the poet at the National Library of Congress begged then to come home with me. Jarrell was a life-long library lover and this seemed just the thing to read and share in bookcrossing.

As her 13-year marriage to poet Randall Jarrell was passionate and filled with travel and intellectual adventure, it is no wonder that it took Mary von Schrader Jarrell 34 years to sort through the memories and present Jarrell, the man, artist, translator and literary critic in this beautiful memoir. After reading this, I have a deeper understanding of Jarrell and the whole atmosphere of 20th Century poetry. In 1956, early in their marriage, Jarrell was 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for two years. He would be called Poet Laureate now. It was a second marriage for both and they enjoyed the Washington scene with von Schrader's young daughters before moving back to Greensboro in North Carolina where Jarrell taught for most of the rest of his life at Greensboro State College for Women. I'd never understood how Jarrell ventured into writing for children before. Here I learned he was discovered by editor Michael di Capua, who was then children's editor at MacMillian. di Capua noticed Jarrell's translations of work from German and asked him to translate Grimm's fairy tales for new English editions. Afterwards Jarrell turned out wonderful work for children and became well-known for his amazing collaborations with illustrator Maurice Sendak. Jarrell's was a life of important friendships with notables such as Tennessee writer Peter Taylor and poet Robert Lowell. He'd been mentored by the likes of Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren in his undergraduate days at Vanderbilt. There were many charming anecdotes and stories of the Jarrells' travels and of Jarrell's work. The first National Poetry Festival was interrupted by the Cuban Missile crisis, I learned. Most of von Schrader Jarrell's descriptions and tellings of her time with her beloved husband are charming and amusing. She frankly and lovingly describes Jarrell's depressions and writer's blocks to give us a full vision of the man and artist. His traumatic death at 51 was not a suicide, she firmly asserts. Many speculated that it was. He was killed instantly, a pedestrian on a highway, hit from the side by a traveling car. After the death of her partner in their "group of two," von Schrader dedicated her life to his memory, editing much of his work and his letters. She did produce a children's book of her own, THE KNEE BABY. von Schrader Jarrell survived her husband for 38 years. At the end of this book, she anticipates being buried next to her mate. Her writing is so engaging here and her mind so well stocked, I regret that she did not leave more of her own voice in other work. von Schrader died only four years after this book was published. Happily, after reading this, I feel she must have felt deeply at peace with her life and marriage.

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