BOOKS
POETRY CHRONICLE
COLLECTED POEMS. By Edith Sitwell. Vonguord. $6.50.
COLLECTED POEMS, 1955. By Robert Groves. Doubledoy. $4.50.
POEMS: COLLECTED AND NEW. By Rolfe Humphries. Scribners. $4.50.
SELECTED POEMS. By Rondoll Jorrell. Knopf. $4.00.
THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES. By W. H. Auden. Rondom House. $3.00.
A MANTELPIECE OF SHELLS. By Ruthven Todd. Bonocio ond Soul, with
Grove. $3 .00.
THE SCARECROW CHRIST AND OTHER POEMS. By Elder Olson.
Noondoy. $3 .00.
WILDERNESS STAIR. By Ben Belitt. Grove. $3 .00.
THE SALT GARDEN. By Howord Nemerov. Little, Brown. $3.00.
BI RTHDAYS FROM THE OCEAN: By Isobello Gordner. Houghton
Mifflin. $3 .00.
THE MIDDLE VOICE. By Constonce Corrier. Swollow. $2.00.
There
is
not much to
be
said for the poetry round-up as a
form of criticism. A group of unrelated books assembled more or less by
editorial accident, a kind of
ad hoc
umpire who may have something
to say about some of them in a space so limited as to preclude adequate
discussion of any of them, and a request to write. Write what? That the
life work of A or B, now for the third or fourth time collected and made
definitive, is more entertaining than X's first thin vol. or the casual
emission of Y in mid-passage? This would be unfair to everyone con–
cerned. We know A and B; they have settled in, established themselves
long since. We know Y, too, well enough to say that he is not in top
form on this occasion, that he has done better in the past and will pre–
sumably do better again. Perhaps we do not know X at all, though we
have probably seen his poems here and there in the Reviews. And
what of the writers who were once so promising, who seem to promise
no longer? What of the writers who get themselves published and turn
out to be respectably unreadable? Unreadable for whom? And who says
so? No, the form is unhappy to begin with, and no good can come of
it; but since the poetry round-up, like the fiction round-up and the
drama round-up, is a convenient institution making for neatness and
suggesting that someone, however inappropriately, has thought about
