From the Blue Ridge to the Big Horns, and wearing
The whole damn Mississippi for a belt.
I'll pull my right, shoe off and kick the mOOn
Clean over God's left shoulder for good luck.
I'm the world's original playboy-look me over.
But many concrete passages are not as goo'd as this. They
fall a little flat; they are not as exuberant as the talk in
Huckleberry Finn,
or in the tall tales of the South and the
West. And they should have more heat and wild gab in
them, because they are poetry, not prose. If the poetic pas-
sages had more splendor and the homely passages this pe-
culiar gift of gab that Engle feels and cannot quite cut loose
with, we should be well on the way to the great poem.
But I'm still unsatisfied with something that goes a little
deeper than power over language. Engle is ardent in his
Com~unist sympathies. But his mind and heart are so ardent
that he skips some of the intellectual re-making that a mid-
dleclass person must undergo before he can write the poetry
that expresses the qualities of Communism.
This poetry is,
rightly understood,
an old-style revolutionary romantic in-
dignation at hunger, injustice, waste, exploitation,
war. He
is right to honor his own American past; it has given him
this all too rare indignation.
We might put it this way: he
feels the way Jack Reed felt before he went to jail. For
instance, he writes passages about Tom Mooney, about the
General Strike in San Francisco. And this excellent distinc-
tion between the picturesque bum and <the unemploy~d
worker:
We have always
Had the hard-boiled cadgers, the old timers
Who'd made a racket of it all their li'Ves,
The tramps and hobos who in any time
Would have been the moochers with the snarling whine,
The scorning bums who hopped the fastest freights,
The fly-by-nights riding the rods to hell,
The down-and-outers scared of death and work ....
Inheritors of wind and hills for home,
The railroad jungle and the can of stew,
The westward moving of a nation fled
Into their blood, the last Americans
Going forever onward without end
Fearing but the black ash of last night's fire,
To sleep in the same bed, a steady job,
Forty-niners of the railway ties
Or
hitting the highway with a hard-luck yarn.
These are of the land, they are a part of it.
But all the millions who are on the street,
Only a few years footloose------'Wandering
From to'wn to town and corner to street corner
The trained minds loafing on the curb or takin;
Jobs a kid! could do, at a kid's wage,
Youngsters just out of school, the men with hands
Quicker than thought, skillful at long-learned trades,
These are the tough reality, it is
Their voice that cries at night.
But by our new values, Engle seems verbose and muddled.
That old word
dream
comes to mind again. There are many ~
hard words and ruthless images, effects of daring and power;
but the verse itself is not hard or compact or clear except in
flashes and bits.
'
.;
In the last section, "Epilogue at the Core of Earth,"
Engle says several things that explain this to me.
Lean heart of man, born for tragedy
Doomed but to break
PARTISAN
REVIEW
he says. And suddenly I understand the recurrent images of
crucifixion, the repeated picture of Christ, the poet's own
heart offered to the world, and I begin to see what ails the
thought of this book, what trips it up from the strength it
might have, why it is .so
frenzied.
You have a future as a poet of the people, Paul Engle.
But great times demand great powers.
GENEVIEVE TAGGARD
THANKSGIVING BEFORE NOVEMBER,
by Norman
Macleod. Parnassus Press. $2.00.
Macleod's book is divided into three parts--one related
to his youth; the second to his years as a self-conscious
poet; the third dealing with conditions and events of the
class struggle. No direct narrative is intended, there being
little continuity from poem to poem. There is, however,
much repetition of mood and considerable sameness of ex-
perience, while the second period of his life has produced a
style of expression which permeates the entire book.
It would not be very valuable to say that this style is
unfortunate.
In a poet whose every lyric is a form of self-
revelation,
style becomes a document of personal history.
His adjectives are a clue to his way of thinking. Macleod's
lack of poetic objectivity is so pronounced that his poems
do not even describe his mind: they really betray it.
Weakness in discipline mars all but a few of the poems.
The poet is unable to control his images, and the,ir profusion
dissipates whatever intensity they may possess. Very often
they are only conceits. The opening line of the first poem
introduces one:
The onion .fkin of our thoughts was transparent as dawn
In clear weather
Another, of the pueblo Indians:
Their eyes are sabrepoints of a tiger
In the ,dawn of a .slow sunset of tears.
It may be assumed from these examples that there are few
poems which have any consistent imagery. Within twenty
lines a mood changes its clothing four or five times-for
ice, the desert, underwater,
and the atmosphere of various
abstractions.
Few of the poems are true lyrics, but rather a mixture of
mood and meditation. There is a tendency to generalize the
most ordinary experiences, to pump them up with after-
thoughts. But these are entirely conditioned by mood and
last as long and no longer than the mood.
It must not be thought that Macleod is unaware of the
instability of his resolutions,
the transient quality of his
ideas. He seems to have been beset by such knowledge
throughout his life. Cities have been too much for him. They
make him overrate the rural, or rather primeval virtues in
a rawly romantic way:
There together,
With children growing, splitting the tamarack
A nd treasuring bacon: the fir cone flavoring
The yoke of food. Whiskey,
co<W,and deer,
Hedgehogs: the sunshine and radwnce of snow!
The soil beneath us and the sodded roof above.
or
Again we would like to walk
In the freedom of rain,
Flesh deluged,
uncaring for cold
That would give once more
A correspondence with heritage
0/
race and the soil.
