Book by NICOLE KRAUSS
Reviewed by
Elizabeth Bishop, in her tender, funny, and deeply restrained memoir of her relationship with Marianne Moore, begins by explaining the title, “Efforts of Affection”: “In the first edition of Marianne Moore’s Collected Poems of 1951 there is a poem originally called ‘Efforts and Affection.’ In my copy of this book, Marianne crossed out the ‘and’ and wrote ‘of’ above it.” It is a strange revision, either obsessive, the act of a fastidious editor, or, possibly, a cryptic admission of something unspeakable or unspoken. The conjunction offers a more open, if inscrutable, connection while the preposition builds tension, hierarchies, acknowledges the possibility of intimacy, loss, indiscretion (and Daniel Varsky’s desk). In the end, either Moore or Bishop or both have let slip a glimpse of something whose larger existence lies hidden away.
