Remembrances of Left Pasts History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry, 1935-1968 by Jobn Lowney Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. 287 pages Tyrus Miller John Lowney's History, Memory, and the Literary Left considers in detail, and with a focus primarily on single, large-scale poetic sequences or volumes, six poets who rarely get mentioned together in the same breatb: Mu- riel Rukeyser, Elizabetb Bisbop, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Thomas McGrath, and George Oppen. Indeed, if one adds a preliminary discussion of Wallace Stevens in the first, more general chapter titled "The Janitor's Poems of Every Day," one might legitimately wonder whether Lowney has not summoned us for a late-modernist poetry version of a Steve AUen gatbering of deceased greats, where William Blake and Ein- stein will anatomize the vicissitudes of human existence alongside Shake- speare, Hitler, and Moses. It is, bowever, the burden of Lowney's argument tbat be bas assembled more than a colloquy of illustrious ghosts, and that a particular weave of cultural affinities and affiliations, ultimately knotted into the broader fabric of an American society sbaped by tbe Popular Front of tbe 1930s and its aftermath, holds these otberwise divergent poets in unforeseen and mostly unacknowledged community. Despite some of tbe examples it discusses. History, Memory, and the Literary Left is not for tbe most part a book tbat deals witb the 1930s as a distinct chronological slice in which such-and-such a writer pro- duced such-and-such a set of works. It is rather about tbe "long 1930s" in American left poetics, an historical space-time that extends, through complex dynamics of memory, nostalgic longing, self-criticism, and poetic re-elaboration or even revisionary "correction," well into later parts of tbe century in tbe lives and works of certain left-wing poets. More tban just a focused study of a period or literary group, Lowney's book can tbus best be seen to contribute to tbe ongoing reappraisal of twentietb-century American left-wing writing impelled by tbe arcbeological salvage work of scbolars sucb as Cary Nelson in Repression and Recovery and Michael Twentieth-Century Literature 54.3 Fall 2008 396