Tell us about your new book. What is its central project?

The New Selected Poems of Robert Lowell aims to introduce a new generation of readers to the American poet Lowell, one of the most significant American poets since 1945. Lowell's literary stardom was a 20th century fact-- but 21st century readers have been less convinced of his significance. My short volume selects Lowell's best poems - 200 or so pages out of a 1500 page Collected Poems - to make the case not simply for his significance but for his brilliance, dexterity, and skill.

What got you started thinking about this set of problems in this way?

I was never a huge fan of Lowell's, so I wanted to see if I could make the case for myself. I also thought that his work might benefit from a shorter selection - trying to get to know a poet's work by looking at 1500 pages of poetry can be daunting even for a patient reader. Lowell's greatest poems - "Skunk Hour," "For the Union Dead," "Man and Wife" to name a few - are some of the most brilliant of the century. I wondered how his work would sound, how his career would seem, if I pared it down to simply its best poems for a 21st century reader.

If you could pair your book with one other text, what would you recommend? Why?

Elizabeth Bishop's Complete Poems. Lowell and Bishop were close friends and they talked about everything. Their poems talk to each other - Lowell's are nervy, tense, confessional, emotional, distressed, and Bishop's are precise, contained, detailed, focused, and concrete. Lowell was a Boston brahmin, an heir, an American aristocrat, and he cared deeply what his parents thought of him. Bishop was an orphan with Canadian origins; she was a lesbian who kept her love life secret. Lowell's poems are obsessed with facts, and Bishop's focused gaze often feels haywire, hysterical in its intense clarity. Lowell's most famous poem, "Skunk Hour" is dedicated to Bishop and Bishop wrote a few poems for Lowell, too. Their struggles with mental illness mean that the wisdom they have to share comes deeply from daily life - when you read them together, you read of a friendship between fellow travelers and opposites, and it's thrilling.

The New Selected Poems of Robert Lowell was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. You can find it here.