FROM “LIFE STUDIES: SEARCHING FOR LOWELL AND HARDWICK IN MAINE” BY ZACHARY FINE, IN THE POINT, MARCH 2021

Reading Hardwick is like walking in a gilded, smoke-filled room, the light barely revealing the furniture. With Lowell, it’s all clarity and suddenness—a succession of bright images.

I thought that maybe if I read them slowly, lines consumed one clause at a time, rolled around in the mouth, some written down and memorized, that maybe I could be pulled into the particular mood and logic of their writing, that by the time I reached Maine, I would already be there—in Hardwick and Lowell’s Maine.

In his poems, Maine is a place of essences and purities, where things are more than they are. Water is more than water, white is more than white, salt is more than salt.

Here too in Maine things bend to the wind forever.
After two years away, one must get used
to the painted soft wood staying bright and clean,
to the air blasting an all-white wall whiter,
as it blows through curtain and screen
touched with salt and evergreen

In Hardwick’s writing, it is a place of attractive surfaces—sun-dappled houses and spires and sloops—that conceal a dark inner core: loss, devastation and brutal cold. The winter behind everything.

“Here, in Maine, every stone is a skull and you live close to your own death. Where, you ask yourself, where indeed will I be buried?”