Gallery of Clouds

Eisendrath (Poetry in a World of Things), a scholar of English Renaissance poetry, combines criticism and memoir in these immersive meditations on Philip Sidney’s 16th-century pastoral romance, Arcadia. Eisendrath notes that the realm of romance is one of “long days; of wonder; of unfilled space and time; of wandering passages” and is the antithesis of modern life. Still, she writes, the genre offers valuable lessons, among them “that the real is what is to be wondered at.” Eisendrath provides snapshot portraits of other artists: the introduction sees Eisendrath presenting her manuscript to Virginia Woolf, who knew Sidney’s descendent; Nicolas Poussin’s 17th-century paintings depict “the idyllic landscape of Arcadia”; Sidney’s younger sister Mary revised Arcadia. Eisendrath embraces the wandering style of the narrative as she leaps around in time and subject matter, describing Sidney’s “glittering” Elizabethan funeral, her own childhood neighborhood at sunset, the history of prose styles, and how reading in public was “a covert operation” in her impoverished youth. A love of language suffuses the volume: Woolf’s writing on Sidney is, for example, a “lavish garden.” This indulgent and singular exercise in lit crit offers much food for thought. Photos. (Apr.)