POE
TRY CHRON I CLE
A PLACE TO STAND. By Devid Wegoner. Indiene University Press. $2.75.
THE DARK HOUSES. By Doneld Hell. Viking. $3.00.
A CAGE OF SPINES. By Mey Swenson. Rinehert. $3.75.
95 POEMS. By E. E. Cummings. Hercourt, Brece. $4.00.
SELECTED POEMS AND NEW. Jose Gercie Ville. McDowell, Obolensky.
$5.00.
A second book of poems is a greater challenge, perhaps, even
than a second novel. The question of when to stop, of how much to
include or reject or postpone that solves itself in the composition and
completion of a prose work, haunts until the very end the process of
assembling a collection of verse. It is easy to make mistakes on the order
of pu1:Hishing too much too soon, or of being swayed too much (perhaps
half out of gratitude for a reasonably intelligent press) by some de–
lineation of "tendencies" that a reviewer has chosen to praise or blame.
And then there is the problem of a possible new phase or direction to
be entered or taken; a poet manages to make significant statements about
the world (as opposed to individual poems in the sense of their being
"objects" or "productions" however highly valued) only by building
an
oeuvre,
by consistently associating a voice with a set of real concerns.
What the novelist can make of the book as the fundamental unit of
enterprise and endeavor, the poet must somehow contrive to distribute
between the discrete poem, on the one hand, and the whole corpus of
work, on the other. By and large, the single volume of poetry is not com–
parable to the novel as a piece of accomplishment. But since any poet's
first book is often more a display of his voice than a decisive indication
of his concerns (as in the case of W. S. Merwin's first two books(, for
example), the second collection of poems fonus the real foundation of
the
oeuvre,
rather than merely its plot and cornerstone.
Three good poets have recently confronted the problem of a second
book in markedly different ways. David Wagoner's
A Place to Stand
seems to bear out certain promises of technique and intention made im–
plicitly by his first collection, but to limit and refine a talent for writing
one kind of poem, rather than for striking out toward distant prospects.
It
is a lovely book, however, precisely because of the success of its self–
knowledge: there are very few poems that don't come off, andl none
that seem to have wandered in from another book (perhaps acknowl–
edged by the fact that the regulation thirty-odd poems are not arranged
in sub-headed sections). Mr. Wagoner's kind of poem takes a story, a
.ceremonial occasion, even an incipient cliche, and makes it the object
