Vitaliy Eyber may have spent more time performing close reading of Marvell's poem than any previous reader, and the results are impressive. One gets the sense that Eyber has lived and breathed inside the poem for years on end, and that his vitriol about critical accounts of the poem stems from this. Upon Appleton House is his crystal goblet and he is weary of the fingerprints left by less discerning, less devoted critics. Practically speaking, the book usefully supplements existing annotated editions of the poem, such as can be found in David Ormerod and Christopher Wortham's Andrew Marvell: Pastoral and Lyrical Poems and Nigel Smith's Poems of Andrew Marvell. Compared to these editions, which are quite valuable in their own right, Eyber's book offers much more help with the poem at its microlevel: with the "multilayered structure of the poetic text, with its wealth of phonic and notional echoes, ambiguities, loci of syntactical complexity, and wordplay." Eyber pays careful, painstaking attention to the poem's complexity, and does his best to present interpretive possibilities and potentially relevant contexts rather than legislate between them. He has given Upon Appleton House the loving, exacting attention it deserves, and the book should be of interest t o scholars or Marvell, graduate students, and even undergraduates.
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