302
PARTISAN REVIEW
He writes mostly of New England, but his mode is earnest rather than
shrewd (the city poems like "Cold Water Flat" and "Tenement
Roof'
are among the less successful ones). One of the best things about this
style is that when it doesn't seem to be working quite right, the effect
is neither silly nor flat, but only a little spasmodic. "Storm in a Formal
Garden" I found to be one of the finest poems in the book, but the
opening sentence has this slightly misplaced Dylan Thomas stagger to
it;
it is only at the end of the stanza that the right key seems to
be there:
Where my struck mother stays,
she wakes to thunderstorms
of doubt. Squalls blacken
her bright-surfaced dreams,
and she stands coldly shaken,
lost in the dripping trees.
And this is the key of the wonderful later stanzas like this one:
Weeds like conscience clog
my rake.
My
mother craves
more love than any son
can give. And I, with leaves
jammed on a s.harpened tine,
sweat where my two hearts tug.
It
is
this tone of voice, showing up in poems as different as "Twelfth
Night," "Barred Islands" and the
felix culpa
poem, "Original Sequence,"
that I like best in Mr. Booth's work, and in these poems, as in "The
Margin," "Polaris," and "The Seiners," he seems both assured and
impressive. Elsewhere, he sometimes tends toward either the unnecessary
ingenuity of the comparison between dragonflies and a searching heli–
copter in "The Lost Boy," or the prolixity of parts of the title poem,
which is a letter to Thoreau and is longer than any other piece in the
book. But any hard-working first book like this one (it was the Lamont
Poetry Selection for 1956, by the way) is bound to have many of the
faults of tentativeness, faults which subsequent work may demonstrate
were embryonic virtues.
W. S. Merwin's
Green with Beasts
contains so much that is brilliant
and profound that I tend to forget all my reservations about its oc–
casional lapses. Some of the smaller poems in it leave me feeling restless
and unsatisfied; on rereading the wonderful "Mountain," I found a
few passages disfigured by a kind of coyness; I regret that Mr. Merwin
