BOOKS
{small sins small death) i' the very defect
of feeling that needs such a grandiose
analogy to bum me!
Yet my
pleasures
are moderated almost to the death
by the embarrassing imagination of
the agony of Europe. How is this?
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This teeters on the border of good poet.ry, but refuses to fall on either
side. Faults: self-conscious self-blame,
pleasures
had to be italicized
(there are no italics in poetry), the perplexed thinker asks the question
the poet cannot answer, the insight is acute but not memorable.
Clark Mills on the other hand, showing the full effects of today's
melee, is beating many poetic and romantic drums, waving unauthorized
trophies from Yeats, Rilke, Auden, Spender, MacNeice, Rimbaud, etc.
including a sprinkling of preposterous fainting spells by Harold Vinal.
The synthesis is highly polished (they look, read and smell like poems)
hut fall apart under a penetrating look. In the main this is harmlessly
bogus poetry (as against the viciously bogus poetry of, we'll say, Harry
Brown), literary, pompous, watery, meaningless, honest kitsch. I quote a
short pAssage from "Aerial":
Her feet glance not on boards but air, when beautiful
as a torch hurled, she soars beneath her canvas heaven,
when weightless as a meteor whose lives are seven
she wears the speed and motion of the lark and gull.
She floats, and with her hair unloosed and lips apart,
high in the white light, brilliant in the blue and gold,
turns like a slow phrase uttered, or a jewel rolled
on velvet, or a knife that seeks and finds the heart.
This sample shows all the faults and virtues of Clark Mills' poetry.
Nice, is the word.
The next two poets don't interest me at all. Miss McGahey seems
colorless, and as for Mr. Schubert, he writes: "A poet who observes his
own poetry ends up ... by finding nothing to observe."
If
Mr. Schubert
is
referring to his own poems, I am inclined to agree with him- a small
talent wisely buried in dull verse.
Karl Shapiro who is last in the book seems by far the best of the
five. That he is able to evaluate society in fresh poetic terms is no mean
achievement today. He has an eye for social and psychic detail, as Louis
MacNeice has an eye for description of things. ("obscene civics of our
self-distrust," "Falls open like a dishonest look, / And shows us, rotted
and
endowed, jlts senile pleasure," "He is only a good alien, nominally
appy.")
The majority of Mr. Shapiro's poems are longish lyrics, all built on
