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Devastating but humane and entirely essential it's the best biography I've ever read. So comprehensive & wonderfully eager to read 'through' the poetry I've a smart crop of fresh annotations in my collected. A small aside to say poor Nick who seems to have been neglected amid the favouritism that poured onto Frieda you deserved better dear.
It's the best portrait of a poet I've encountered too it's especially striking how entirely disciplined SP was & more so than just about any poet of the 20thc that comes to mind she never let herself slack. Her precision is well-known it is hypereminent but I think it's telling that probably eight or nine times Clark is forced to say x poem marks a major turning point in her poetic development, nothing would be the same hereafter.
It's an emotionally exhausting work it's charitable in perhaps unexpected ways I do find Red Comet a monumental work of scholarship beyond all reason of what biography has done.

What is so real as the cry of a child?