This review is taken from PN Review 9, Volume 6 Number 1, September - October 1979.
HARD SQUARES
Jeremy Hooker, Solent Shore (Carcanet) £2.00
There's that story told by some one-is it Wyndham Lewis?-of visiting Pound in Paris and finding him sparring with Hemingway, stripped the pair of them for boxing. Pound was no match for Hemingway. But twenty years ago he was more than a match for me, with a defence cast-iron like Hemingway's against the use that I wanted to make of him, when I had gone in his wake to Rapallo. Pound had lived there; so had Hauptmann and Beerbohm and, for months at a time, Yeats. But none of them were any good to me, trying to catch hold of some trailing associations and so get a purchase on the place. Pound at any rate left it as hard and clear, as bleakly challenging, as he had found it. Yet it was his home, and he felt for it as for a home:
so that leaving America I brought with me $80
and England a letter of Thomas Hardy's
and Italy one eucalyptus pip
from the salita that goes up from Rapallo
(if "I go) . . .
. . . if he goes, that is out of Italy from the prison in Pisa, where he's writing. And of course he did go, from there to trial in America. But the hillslope above Rapallo that the eucalyptus seed came from-was it the slope we climbed one Sunday morning, where a long stair of earth and stone went ...
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