578
PARTISAN REVIEW
Naked they came, a niggling core of girls
Maggoting gaily in the curling wool
Of morning mist, and careless as the lark
That gargled overhead
. . .
The rest of the book is full of staggering hyphenations ("pin-drizzled,"
"ear-lighted"), overshot similes ("the bay bare like a gong/Unbruised,"
"his nostrils quivered and fanned wide/Like twanged elastic"), trite–
nesses ("Night spread its slow and pinholed awning now/Over the sea"),
general phonomania ("The stuttering blackbird skittered away/Into the
ditches, dropping its stitches"), etc. Perhaps this is a game, in which
case I think the rest of us deserve to know the rules. Meanwhile,
Rodgers seems to be having a marvelous time by himself.
None of the poems in
Various Jangling Keys,
by Edgar Bogardus
(this year's selection in the Yale Series of Younger Poets), is altogether
easy or mature, but there is plenty of evidence that Bogardus knows
what good poetry is and is aware of his own best faculties for approach–
ing it. This is poetry from the school at Gambier-moral, metaphysical,
witty. But Bogardus possesses a livelier sense of the comic than most of
his predecessors, and a wryer sense of language. In fact, some of his
poems are not witty, in the "literary" meaning of the word, but down–
right funny; perhaps Bogardus is the one to do something about the
poor estate of light verse in these days. In any case, these poems show
clearly that Bogardus, unlike some of the other poets whose books have
appeared in the Yale series, will continue to write and will probably
give us really first-rate poems in the future.
Jean Garrigue's poems are often maimed by the ravels and snarls
of her argument, a very feminine argument of the darkest and fiercest
kind. She goes out of her way to tangle with all the adversaries that
love and fate can put up against her. Hence, she risks many failures. And
she compounds the danger by insisting on exoticism and indirection in
her language. Many of the poems in
The Monument Rose
climb un–
successfully toward the brink of articulateness. A few reach it, especially
"Gravepiece," "The Maimed Grasshopper Speaks Up," and "Address
to the Migrations."
The Anathemata,
by David Jones, is an astonishing poem. It is
two hundred pages long; it has an average of four or five notes to a
page; it contains, in addition to a considerable amount of Greek, Latin,
German, French, Italian, etc., a generous interlarding of Welsh-a
language which is, on the face of it, so unutterable that most Americans
