. 488
PA RTISAN REVIEW
forties after the ravages of the second World War. I admit it is not
a cheerful picture, but, .as Sholom Aleichem would say,
if
it weren't
true, would I have said so? The metaphor of the Resistance has long
since become the literal reality. True, you are not lined up against a
wall and shot by the authorities of the occupation; but if not in blood
you pay in neurosis, in the wreck of body and the drain of energy,
disturbance of the heart, stomach, liver, and the galling impatience
and powerlessness of all your days. And unlike that other Resistance
you are denied the consolation of feeling yourself particularly a hero,
you do not have the nervous release into the violence of throwing a
bomb at the Wehrmacht generals like Louis B. Mayer or Henry Luce.
But looking back·at the long and motley collection which Miss Ulrich's
bibliography spreads before us, and allowing too ...for all the crackpot
bohemian, half-baked and self-indulgent attitudes that have sprouted
there, shall we not also accord to them too the title of "hero"?
WILLIAM BARRETT
THE POET AND HIS PUBLIC
LocAL MEASURES.
By Josephine Miles. Reynal
&
Hitchcock.
$2.00.
WoMEN OF THE HAPPY IsLAND.
By Adam Drinan. William A1acLellan,
Glasgow.
3/ 6.
A LITTLE TREASURY OF MoDERN PoETRY.
Edited by Oscar Williams.
Scribner's.
$2.75.
PoEMS 1938-45.
By Robert Graves. Creative Age.
$2.00.
LouGH DERG.
By Denis Devlin. Reynal
&
Hitchcock.
$2.00.
PATERSON (BooK I).
By William Carlos William. New Directions.
$2.50.
NoRTH AND SouTH.
By Elizabeth Bishop. Houghton Mifflin.
$2.00.
I
N JosEPHINE MILES' poems some overspecialized sensitivity and ability
come to a cautionary end-mostly because Miss Miles asks surprisingly
little of herself, and seems to feel that the world and poetry ask even
less. Each of the poems in
Local Measures-an
acute title-fits con–
veniently on a single page: the poem is not the worked-out, required,
sometimes lengthy expression of a subject that is trying to realize itself
through Miss Miles, but only one more product of the Miles method for
turning out Miles poems. These seem easily different from anybody else's
poems, but hardly distinguishable from one another: their language, tone,
and mechanism of effect have a relishingly idiosyncratic and monotonous
regularity, as
if
they were the diary some impressionable but unimpas-
