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tricks up his sleeve which, at first, are quite surprising and interesting.
But since they are produced with great regularity and constant repeti–
tion, they tend to become stereotypes. The surprise soon wears off and
the interest wanes.
Hans Meyerhoff
POETRY (HRON ICLE
POEMS (NORTH
&
SOUTH; A COLD SPRING). By Elizabeth Bishop.
Houg hton Mifflin. $3.50.
JOURNEY TO LOVE. By William Carlos Williams. Random House. $3.00.
THE GENTLE WEIGHT LIFTER. By David Ignatow. Morris Galle ry. $3 .00.
THE NI GHT FISHING. By W. S. Graham. Grove Press. $2.50.
GOOD NEWS OF DEATH AND OTHER POEMS. By Lou is Simpson.
(IN POETS O F TODAY 11 .)* Charles Scribners. $3.50.
THE SECOND MAN AND OTHER POEM S. By Louis O. Coxe. University
of Minnesota Press. $2.75.
EXILES AND MARRIAGES. By Donald HalJ. Vikin g. $3.00.
Elizabeth Bishop's poetry aspires to a very high order of craft
and sensibility- to a perch, say, which only Marianne Moore, among
living women poets, precariously occupies. Fellow poets have found in
her limited performance a judiciousness and sympathy of the greatest
distinction; the effect of her work on Randall J a rrell, for example, has
bcen to put him in a state of permanent exaltation. Such praise is un–
fortunate-it sets the reader's expectations too high. Miss Bishop has
considerable verbal skill, a gift for independent perception, and a habit
of making commonplace things appear either charming or unique. Her
poetry deserves recognition, but not any more than W. S. Graham's or
David Ignatow's, whose work, with all its defects, is a good deal more
vital and penetrative than Miss Bishop's.
North
&
South,
published
separately nine years ago, and
A Cold Spring,
together make up her
present volume. The poems arrest one by their brilliant surfaces and
transparency. But underneath is a curious rigidity, a dis turbing lack of
movement and affective life, betraying a sprained and uneasy patience.
They frequently resemble the fish in her most anthologized poem of
that name : caught half-dead, the fi ght knocked out of it, "... a
grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely," achieving, in
the end, a pyrrhic victory by being thrown back into the sea.
*
Also included in this volume, but not reviewed here a re :
The Hat ch: Poems
by Norma Farber, and
Th e Irony of Joy: Poems
by Robert Pack.
