hand and, to my knowledge, had perfect recall of any thing he read.
That’s one of the reasons, I’m sure, I have no memory: just a mulch. I
still (in storage) have a hand-written anthology of poetry he made for
me when I was a child.^6The gap between the two literary worlds—between that of the Catholic
Month, with its maudlin late-Victorian locutions (“Your mother loves to
look after the ®owers, and I begin to think they love to see her”) and the
postmodern world of Tom Raworth and Ed Dorn, is obliquely ¤gured in the
image, at the close of the letter, of “Carlyle [who] used to order a box of long
clay pipes from Paisley and smoke a new one every day, putting the old one
on the doorstep, before he went to bed, to be taken by who would.” Carlyle’s
pipes, smoked and discarded on the doorstep, have given way to the joints
smoked by young Tom, who also leaves things on the doorstep—stale cake
crumbs for the birds and squirrels. Clearly, the literary son owes much to his
literary father, but the gap between the two is too wide to bridge. “I shall
type the address in caps,” writes Tom’s father, as I don’t know if YADDO is
the name of a person or a place or the initials of an organization.” And he
signs his letter “May God bless and direct you,” where “direct” must be the
ultimate verb from which the son is prone to recoil.
Between the receipt of this letter and the publication of “Letters from
Yaddo,” both Mary Raworth née Moore and Thomas Alfred Raworth died—
she in 1983, he in 1986, when Visible Shivers was already in press. The book
is dedicated to their memory. But the text itself makes no commentary on
family relationships; rather, the next letter to Ed is conceived by the poet as
“a cassette of winter 1947 (visual) with a sound track from 1971” (10). Actu-
ally, the “cassette” may be said to have three tracks: the ¤rst is a visual image
of a sick child in a freezing room, whose mother and father are trying to
comfort him with hot water bottles during a terrible cold spell. Returning to
this passage once we have read the concluding account of Raworth’s diagno-
sis and operation, we can see that even then he was suffering from his con-
genital defect, although no one seemed to know it. This visual track, in any
case, intersects with a second visual one, recording terrifying dreams, whose
time and location is not speci¤ed, particularly one in which the dreamer has
lost all the money in his tin box (but is also the policeman who stole it) and
has “dropped the key down a drain outside King’s Cross Station.” And the
third, or sound, track takes place in the present of Yaddo, Tom receiving a
letter from his twelve-year-old son that reads in part:
I hope it’s o.k. in America for you. If you see a Hell’s Angel take a photo
for me.Raworth’s “Letters from Yaddo” 237