490
PARTISAN REVIEW
.. .
For I have looked,
0
mother in whose breast
I used to hide my face when I was frightened,
on men that had been burned alive,
their hands bent and fingers fused like flippers,
Their not quite human features not quite seals'.
And Mr. Drinan begins his book:
(Over this island the wind sweeps continuously.
...
Some–
times it passes angrily and with noise; sometimes it crawls almost
imperceptibly, sometimes it seems to disappear altogether. But al–
ways it is passing over.
At the moment the wind is soft and leisurely. The daylight is
fading from the levels at which people live. Up a pass from one
house-studded bay to another, two figures are walking, a man and
a woman, like ants on a knucklebone. In the western entrance to
the pass the sun sets: in th e eastern entrance the moon rises.)
I've never met anyone who has heard of this writer; in these days,
when American publishers have the money and inclination to print al–
most all poets, surely one of them will have the sense to publish Mr.
Drinan.
A Little Treasur•y of Modern Poet1y
is a standard Oscar Williams
production: a preface which is sometimes ordinary sense, and sometimes
a Cry from the Heart of the Poet ("Now I like high and serious poetry
to such a degree that I cannot imagine life worth living without it..
:
.
Since with God all things are possible, poets and readers in
unison may work their own miracle by which the human heart
may yet so enlarge that it outweighs the atomic bomb"); oval Por–
traits of the Poets; a dust-jacket that crams down the gullets of the
hungry sheep this "authorita.tive collection of the best poems written
during the last fifty years," and that ends, as always, with the truthful
statement that W. H . Auden prefers the poetry of Oscar Williams to
that of Wallace Stevens and Dylan Thomas. (At this point I always
blush and wish that the grasses were waving over me and over Auden
too.) After looking unbelievingly at "The Great Lover" and "The Man
with the Hoe" and "I Have a Rendezvous with Death" and "Chimbo–
razo, Cotopaxi" and "They Went Forth to Battle but They Always Fell";
after reading poems by Ben Maddow, Helen Hoyt, Frederick Mortimer
Clapp, Edith Wyatt, Esther Matthews, and many anotl1er; after looking
in vain for a single poem by Robert Lowell, Sturge Moore, Henry Reed,
Howard Baker, and many another; after finding in the Light Verse sec–
tion Yeats' wonderful "John Kinsella's Lament for Mrs. Mary l'vioore";
after working a way through excessive wastes of Barker and Derwood
and Fuller and Manifold and Masefield and Symons and Prokosch and
