BOOKS
489
sioned monomaniac had year by year been engraving on the side of a
knitting-needle. Miss Miles specializes in the sly, dry, minimal observa–
tion. The poems are full of the conversational elegance of understate–
ment, of a carefully awkward and mannered charm. Everything is just a
little off; is, always, the precisely unexpected: so that after a while it
becomes the expected, and the repetitions of words, the omissions of
words or phrases required by ordinary syntax, the little voluntary tricks
of technique, seem as automatic as the emotions or ideas they accompany.
Certainly the poems are "sincere" (else why say no more than this?)
and personal (though perhaps in the beginning they were derived from
certain possibilities in the poems of Marianne Moore and John Ransom);
sometimes the phrases are good and the perceptions real, and I suppose
it is nicer to have them come to nothing by Miss Miles' private formula
than by one bought from the authorities of the day. But she is sadly
bureaucratized. To write really good poems, not her individualized
cultivated little affairs, she would have to have a change of heart–
or else spend years on a corrective, some violent emotional epic, and
thus in the end be dragged back to a better and more ordinary sort of
poetry. But in some way she must come to be possessed by her daemon,
instead of possessing him so complacently.
If
the fool persisted in his folly
he would become wise, said Blake; but he said nothing of the sort about
the wisdom in which the foolish more ordinarily persist.
Adam Drinan's
Women of the Happy Island
is unusual and attrac–
tive. It is half prose and half poems: the poems are said by the people of
a small Scotch island, and the prose-which is better than the poetry,
generally-tells you who says the poem, and where, and how. The poems
are extremely uneven in technique and realization; they have many
faults, but they also have enough affection and knowledge to convince
you that Mr. Drinan is a writer in the only sense in which it matters to
be one.
If
he learns to get into his poems everything that is in his prose
he will be a good poet. It is a pleasure to read a new poet who loves
and understands people and the world, instead of language and rhetoric
and allusions, the rules and writers of the fashionable schools. It would
take a great deal of quotation to convey the freshness and proportion and
honesty of some of this writing, its closeness to what it describes; when
you finish Mr. Drinan's book you have read few good poems, but you
have seen the things of his book as they are, you have known the island.
A girl writes home from the war, and says that she
...
never again will loiter down to the shore
clapping my hands and whistling and calling
To the men-faced seals on the skerries any more ...
. . .
nor watch them heaving on their clumsy hands .
..
