BOOKS
POETRY, UNLIMITED
There isn't a good poem in
The Arrivistes,
but Louis Simpson
is as promising a new poet as I've read in some time. His poems are
gay, felt, mocking, rather inexperienced, thoroughly uneven, thoroughly
unexpected poems; they are not organized or thought out into successful
works of art, but a few of their lines or stanzas are good, and more than
a few are beautifully funny (for instance, the pseudo-Jacobean sections
of "The Vagrants"). The ordinary young poet is a part of all that h e
has read, a summation of standard influences, as tame as can be. Mr.
Simpson seems genuinely wild: sometimes he sounds like himself, a
surprising creature in a surprising world, and the rest of the time he
manages to make (sometimes very funny) allusions out of all his in–
fluences, so that his rhetorical education is one public joke after another.
His worst mistakes, awful mistakes, somehow don't alienate you; at his
best he is witty and moving, a fine amateur who ought-with luck–
to turn into a good professional. H e is a surprisingly
live
poet: as you
read him you forget for a moment tha t we are the ancients. A critic can
hardly resist saying to this particular poet: Whatever you do, don't pay
any a ttention to critics-and here is a quotation to use as an amulet:
"Against criticism we can neither protect nor defend ourselves; we
must act in despite of it, and gradually it resigns itself to this."
The poems in Elizabeth Coatsworth's
Th e Creaking Stair
are,
roughly, more commonplace versions of de la Mare's scarey poems ; all
the fairy-tale, ghost-story properties in the world are in them. But some–
times these are used, not just exhibited, and once or twice they come
to exact and frightening life: the ogre's maid, scrubbing the floor
*
Th e Arrivistes.
By Louis Simpson. Fine Editions Press. $2.00;
The Creaking
S tair.
By Elizabeth Coatsworth. Coward McCann. $5.00 ;
No Moat No Castle.
By Donald F. Drummond. Alan Swallow. $2 .00;
The Broke n Landscape.
By John
Williams. Alan Swallow. $2.00 ;
An Acre In the Seed.
By Theodore Spencer.
Harvard University Press. $2.50;
The Beast In His Hun ger.
By H arry Brown.
Knopf. $2.50;
Poems
1943-1949. By Francis Golffing. Cummington Press. $2.75;
Volume Two.
By Jose Garcia Villa. New Directions. $3.00.
