612
PARTISAN REVIEW
Powered by the fire of summer, bundles fall
Folded to die beside a burlap shroud;
And so my broken brother may lie mown
Out of the wasted fallows, winds return,
Corn-yellow tassels of his hair blown down,
The summer bear him sideways in a bale
Of darkness to October's mow of cloud.
The echoes we hear of Hopkins' "Felix Randall" or Lowell's poem on
the death of Arthur Winslow .do nothing to spoil our pleasure in the
poem's grave vitality and originality. The mowing machine comes alive;
the struggle between man and machine is fixed with a clear-eyed
knowledge and controlled emotion rare at any time.
Edgar Bowers' very small book reveals a gift of the order of Chat–
terton's. He is not slick, but the kind of precocious perfection of harmony,
depth of comment and richness of characterization he has managed in
his early twenties provokes the same amazement. This is one of those
books that describe themselves, in phrases' like "Subdued essential ripened
through excess," "Ingenuous patience eager with assent," "Unshadowed
being turning like a wheel," "bitter phidian serenity" or "spectacular
innocence." Bowers writes like someone who has read Keats intensively
under the eye of Yvor Winters, sacrificing everything to a leisurely,
sumptuous intellectuality and a remarkably disillusioned brilliance of
phrasing. The disillusionment of the '50s is not that of
fin de siecle;
no
Dowsonian languors here. Mr. Bowers even seems to be a Christian,
if one can assume it from several uses of "He" and "Him.'" Little
originality in his themes, which run to richly turned paradoxes, fluent
polarities, short imaginative flights around a deeply felt, elaborately
reasoned harmony-Mozart (2 poems), graveyards (2 poems), several
elegies, religious meditations, "To Accompany an Italian Guide-Book,"
and a striking poem on a German prince whose son turned traitor and
spy. His rhetorical means are the simplest, being ambling iambic lines
set either in strictly rhymed quatrains or blank verse. Still, it
is
remark–
able; one had not expected Parnassian verse to be so attractive again.
The reason for its excellence, I think, is that Mr. Bowers thoroughly
enjoys what he is doing, is wise well beyond his years and has a rare
temperamental poise.
Howard Moss is not limited by being a
UN
ew Yorker
poet." He
d()es more than anyone else to redeem that magazine's by now some–
what arthritic image of the happily precarious cosmopolitan, the kindly
