POETRY
149
to a habit of vigilance, a quickened control and poise, sometimes bravado,
that he clearly believes in as a source of power. The phrase "on the
rocks" springs unexpectedly to life in this section from "The Broken
Home":
When my parents were younger this was a popular act:
A veiled woman would leap from an electric wine-dark car
To the steps of no matter what-the Senate or the Ritz Bar–
And bodil)I, at newsreel speed, attack
No matter whom-Al Smith or Jose Maria Sert
Or Clemenceau-veins standing out on her throat
As she yelled
War mongerer! Pig! Give us the vote!,
And would have to be hauled away in her hobble skirt.
What had the man done? Oh, made history.
Her business (he had implied) was giving birth,
Tending the house, mending the socks.
Always that same old stor)l–
Father Time and Mother Earth,
A marriage on the rocks.
All conversational ease and finally outrageous humor, the wit allows us
momentary relaxation and then plants its sting. The newsreel proves
more than quaint, is charged with meaning in the context of a long poem
whose speaker is exorcizing the ghosts of a broken home. Beneath amused
glimpses of twenties bravado, the verse penetrates to parents' energies
(both envied and resented) that shape and cripple a child's. "The Broken
Home" is a splendid example of both the poise and the psychological
intensity which distinguish these poems, and like "The Thousand and
Second Night" it gives us a sense of dangerous mastery. The wit is ex–
hilarating precisely because it is exercised in the shadow of brooding
enemies honestly faced-one's past, out of one's control; and time.
It would be misleading to suggest that all the poems in this volume
are cut from the same cloth; if anything the book has less unity than
Water Street.
There is an exuberant "Violent Pastoral" which brings
Death back into Arcadia in a surprising way. There are also several fine
love poems, particularly "Days of 1964," recalling Cavafy, which concludes
the book. And the volume includes a second very long poem, "From the
Cupola."
It
plays out the tale of Cupid and Psyche in modern instances,
its heroine a New England spinster with a haunted attachment to an
unknown stranger, mocked by sisters named, mischievously, Alice and
Gertrude. Though as interesting an experiment in extended form as "The
Thousand and Second Night," its protagonist is less dramatically recog-
