606
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.
PARTISAN REVIEW
What, I think, is most impressive about this is less the unassuming live–
liness of some of the language--"Crouch in the fo'c'sle/Stubbly with
goodness," etc.-than a certain air the thing has: a mixture of con–
siderable poetic precision and considerable offhandness.Mr. Larkin's
achievement, in fact, is not to have mapped out any great new con–
tinent of poetry; it is simply to have created a tone of voice for the
time: sour, mildly sardonic, determinedly unsentimental (though in
his serious poems he is often sentimental about his lack of sentiment).
It
is nonsense to call the young men angry. Most of them are simply
depressed.
Finding his own tone of voice is one of Mr. John Hollander's pre–
occupations in
A Crackling of Thorns.
He tries on a number of styles
before, by way of Auden's, he manages to fashion his own. And his
own is the "New York witty." He is bright and quick with ideas and
clever with words, one of the few young poets who can pun without
setting one's teeth on edge. This he manages in all sorts of ways; he
puns straight:
You have unmade your be1d, now lie about it.
(a propos
of a divorce) ; or literary:
...
the wind, increasing,
Sands teeth, sands eyes, sands taste, saTl1ds everything.";
or polyglot:
And the roaring of the sand's eidge,
Tunditur unda,
Thundering under .
..
About his puns and about the elaborate metrical tasks he sets himself,
Mr. Hollander has an admirable "Look, no hands" air. He is, tech–
nically, a skillful writer, but he has at times a certain difficulty in find–
ing enough to be skillful about. He can fill out any lighter, lyric form
with a good deal of
elan:
And so in every age we find
Each Jack, destroying every Joan,
Divides and conquers womankind
In ,vengeance for his missing bone.
By day he spins out quaint conceits
With gossip, flattery, and song,
