A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square

What a fantasy, to stay at the same dreamy hotel where Amy Lowell and Ada Russell stayed when they visited London to join the Imagists as World War I dawned.

This is a luxuriant home base with no holds barred. No place on earth is more comfortable than the Berkeley.

Waiting in our room when we arrive is a bottle of champagne, treats, and chocolate swirls on a plate that spell out The Boston Castrato. The hotel staff is aware I'm chasing Amy here with a breakfast reading in Lowell's honor at the Berkeley in the morning.
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Who cares about Amy Lowell in England? More people do after I read Lowell's exquisite "East, West, North, and South of a Man," which first appeared in Harper's in 1924 and was the leadoff poem in Lowell's posthumous volume What's O'Clock, which won the 1926 Pulitzer.






The poem is ahead of its time. It prefigures some of Sylvia Plath's scorching lines in "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy." To read it, visit http://www.poetrynook.com/poem/east-w...

Lowell could be sweet, too. We explore some of her famous "Chinoiseries," her singular form based on the haiku. We read two of her love poems to Ada. One of them is "In A Garden": http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/...

Guests at this breakfast reading include top novelists Miranda Miller (The Fairy Visions of Richard Dadd: A Novel) and Sarah Walton (Rufius), who enchant with their conversations and listen intently to tales of Amy Lowell's London sojourns, almost floating to her through time in this spot a century ago. Lowell would have admired their gifts to see beyond the seen.