"The majority of the book consists of the epic title poem which tells the story of Anne Kavanaugh, a widow living in Maine in 1943, who "is sitting in her garden playing solitaire" and Lowell tells her story through a series of stream-of-consciousness flashbacks in which she recalls her troubled relationship with her now-deceased husband, Harry.The editors of Lowell's "Collected Poems", Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, include a large footnote on the poem with an excerpt from Hugh Staples' book "Robert Lowell