Survivor's Manual

By Martha Duffy

THE DOLPHIN, 78 pages. $6.95;

HISTORY, 207 pages. $7.95;

FOR LIZZIE AND HARRIET, 48 pages. $6.95. by ROBERT LOWELL

Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

At 56. Robert Lowell is the country's leading claimant to the title of major poet. Most of his generation -Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell. John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz -are dead. When Lowell published his first book. Lord Wearys Castle, right after World War II. critics overwhelmed him with praise. Over the years he has proved a poet of exceptional intelligence and technical craft rather than mercurial lyric gifts.

Two of these books -For Lizzie and Harriet and History -are reworkings of a long sequence of sonnets called Notebook. 1967-68. Lowell wanted the work to be considered a single, variegated poem, and indeed it is an intertwined record of his preoccupation with politics, dead friends. his wife Elizabeth Hardwick, their daughter Harriet, and various literary and historical figures. Since then, Lowell has gone to England and remarried. For Lizzie and Harriet may be a kind of parting present, an extract from Notebook containing all the poems (some now rewritten) addressed to his daughter and former wife.

There are 80 new poems in History, as well as more fretwork done on the original sonnet group. The enlargement intensifies the problem that Notebook had from the start: too much trivia. The strong poems get lost in material that is simply organized jotting.

The Dolphin contains more bad news for Lowell's admirers. These are all new poems. Most of them are fluent yet curiously flat. They represent a return to the preoccupations and personal style of Life Studies (1959), Lowell's best book and easily the most influential volume of American poetry published in the past 15 years. His writing about chronic mental disturbance and hospitalization opened a whole school of so-called confessional verse that flourished in the '60s. Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and W.D. Snodgrass, among others, wrote gruesome self-examinations stiff with hatreds and self-pity, openly mixing honesty, courage and sentimentality. They were startling constructs, and if nothing else, helped clear away the academic style of the '50s.

It is depressing to find Lowell, more than a decade after the tension and vigor of Life Studies, in and out of yet another hospital ("My twentieth in twenty years"), observing another small offspring, writing the same kind of stuff about London that he wrote about New York. By this time he even has the courage of his own callousness. Duly enclosed in quotation marks are poems fashioned from letters written by Elizabeth Hardwick after he left her. They may have been intended as literary strategy: contrasting a woman's naked loss with her man's fragile new happiness, his little son's first steps ("Small pets avoid him ... Who wants to shake hands with a dead friend?"). In the inevitable 14-line casings, these poems are as listless as the rest.

Life Studies burst out after a spell of staleness in Lowell's work, and one hopes that he will find fresh impetus again. The book's last poem demonstrates his strengths -candor, elegance, a survivor's dispassion and an energy that is missing in much of the book:

I have sat and listened to too many

words of the collaborating muse,

and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,

not avoiding injury to others,

not avoiding injury to myself -to ask compassion . . .

my eyes have seen what my hand

did.

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