MLRy 98.4, 2003 977 disarming simplicity in a critic who is, after all, one of the great readers of Marianne Moore and John Ashbery is a reminder of how Bromwich has been in the vanguard in encouraging students to explore difficultpoetry. The reprinting of these essays in one volume would be an important event for this reason alone. The art of quotation is pursued in the chapter on Marianne Moore. Bromwich eschews what he calls 'Moore-ishness' (p. 91), the critical habit of quoting copiously fromher work without anchoring the quotations into specific poems. Instead, he takes three poems, beginning with statements about meaning, and then leads the reader into a consideration of the effectof her quoted sententiae, her aphorisms in situ. Thus his generalization is fully earned: 'Moore's poems abound in wise feelings, which she often appears to set in place with an air of having leftroom forsomething of that sort, in case itshould ask foradmission' (p. 98). Bromwich's acute perception ofthe psychic spaces of poems is matched by a sensitivity to the nuances of poetic relationship: the essay on Moore and Elizabeth Bishop traces not only the relationship of the letters in which Moore is in the role of mentor, but how the shaping of Bishop's poem 'Roosters' is charged with assimilations and rejections of that teaching. The following chapter, the well-known essay 'Elizabeth Bishop's Dream-Houses', is one ofthe landmarks of Bishop studies, and remains important, not least in the emphasis that 'Bishop's work offers resistance to any surmise about the personality of the author.' As there has been much biographical surmising about Bishop recently, it seems salutary to quote Bromwich (writing in 1981) on the effectof a Bishop poem. He acknowledges that the poems might seem to invite personal interpretations as they 'have been so carefully furnished with eccentric details or gestures': These may seem tokens of companionability, yet a certain way into a poem the atmo? sphere grows a little chill; furtherin, as the conversation strolls on, one senses the force field ofa protective ease. On rereading Bishop's work, the question likeliest to occur is: what are the poems concealing? (p. 122) Sexuality and gender have been top of the critical interest list for Bishop since these words were written, yet Bromwich is still timely in the reminder that the progression ofa Bishop poem is often one of 'steady mystification'. For Bromwich, words written 'dead on the line' (quoting from John Ashbery's 'Tapestry') are ultimately a ' surface we cannot pry beneath' (p. 194). The essays in this collection, on Ashbery, Moore, Bishop, Rich, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, James Merrill, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill (and including Hemingway as a prose stylist), comprise a critical vade-mecum of modern poetry. In the opening essay, 'An Art without Importance' (a new one written expressly for this book), Bromwich reaffirmsthe value of reticence in modernist poetry, 'a rhetoric of understatement' (p. 3), but also of poise. His close readings, subtle, intelligent, lucid, bring those values to our 'mind's ear'. University of Reading Pat Righelato Retelling the Tale: An Introduction to Medieval French Literature. By Simon Gaunt. London: Duckworth. 2001. 160 pp. ?11.99. ISBN 0-71562-925-5. Despite its title, Simon Gaunt is clear that this book is not a conventional introduction to medieval French literature, and indeed one often feels, despite Gaunt's assertion (p. 6) that it is intended for 'general readers beginning their exploration' of that corpus, that the reader of the volume would need considerable experience to follow arguments drawn from frequently allusive accounts ofthe material being analysed. It is rather an introduction to reading, at least to a certain way of reading, Old French 978 Reviews Literature, ultimately derived from the reflections of Paul Zumthor and Bernard Cerquiglini on the instability of the medieval text, and from Barthes and Derrida on ecriture and the death of the author. Apart from discussing the role of the voice in communicating medieval literature to its audience, in the original sense, the main thrust of the book deals with questions of rewriting and adaptation. The introduction has brief sections on 'Literature...