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Title: Folly Adieu
Review: In print Merrill admits his faults disarmingly. Lurie brings a different sensibility to the task. This is no literary biography. Whether Merrill and Jackson pair more like Pope and Bolingbroke or Auden and Kallmann would be out of place. This memoir invites comparisons to Scott and Zelda, poets and their faculty wives. It's probably the best thing for future biographies that most of the worst and most prosaic things that could be said about Merrill and Jackson have now been said by a friend. Merrill fans will pick up bits of gossip. Readers unfamiliar with Merrill's work will be pleasantly surprised if they follow this book with his poetry.
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