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G. S. FRASER
nizable, perhaps less a "psyche" than the speaker of the other long
poem.
Finally, what marks off
Nights and Days
as a distinct collection is its
strong sense of how Time shadows a life. Time's presence is stronger and
more troubling than it was in
Water Street.
An inverse measure of the
control and poise mustered against it are those moments when figures do
"let go," like the speaker at the end of the poem "Time," who catches
sight of something "not unlike / Meaning relieved of sense," or the man
whose resisted temptation in "A Carpet Not Bought" cannot save him
from "that morning ... When sons with shears / Should set the pattern
free / To ripple air's long floors / And bear hirn safe / Over a small
waved sea." Or the splendid moment at the end of "The Thousand and
Second Night" when the captivity of fantasy and fl esh is finally ended
and Scheherezade takes her leave of the Sultan. These visions are the most
gifted passages in the poems, often occurring powerfully in their last lines.
But they are measured, guarded by "an old distrust of imaginary
scenes." The passion for release haunts
Nights and Days,
though it
remains, now, wisely, a passion unfulfilled, deferred , glimpsed in its
relation to the nagging voices of everyday.
David Kalstone
BRECHT, GRASS, VOZNESENSKY
DIE HAUSPOSTILLE; MANUAL OF PIETY. By Bertolt Brecht. Bilingual;
English text by Eric Bentley. Grove Press. $10.00.
SELECTED POEMS. By Gunter Grass. Translations by Michael Hamburger
and Christopher Middleton. Harcourt, Brace, and World. $3.95.
VOZNESENSKY: SELECTED POEMS. Translation by Herbert Marshall.
Hill and Wang. $4.50.
Mr. Bentley, its translator, thinks
Die Hauspostille,
Brecht's
first collected volume, both one of the most remarkable first volumes of
poems in modem literature and also "the most impressive single group
of poems," as a whole, that Brecht produced. He thinks the volume has
never had its due because it came out before Brecht had become a Com–
munist and contains the famous "Hymn of the Red Army Soldier," which
