BOOKS
467
A PRIDE OF POETS
THE ELEGIES OF A GLASS ADONIS. By C.
A.
Trypanis. With a typo–
graphical note by Will Carter. Chifmark Press. $12.50.
THE IKONS AND OTHER POEMS. By Lawrence Durrell. E. P. Dutton
&
Co. $3.50.
SHORT POEMS. By John Berryman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $4.50.
NEW AND SELECTED POEMS. By Jean Garrigue. Macmillan. $5.95.
"A" 1-12. By Louis Zukofsky. Doubleday. $4.95.
PREPOSITIONS. The Collected Essays of Louis Zukofsky. Horizon Press.
$5.00.
WORDS. Poems by Robert Creeley. Scribners. $4.95.
POEMS 3. By Alan Dugan. Yale. $4.50.
This is a more distinguished bunch of books than a profes–
sional reviewer of poetry is usually likely to find on his plate for one
meal, and the feeling perhaps is that it is rich, but it is indigestible. To
put it another way, there is a distinguished essay by Michael Oakeshott
called
The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind.
One
has
an uneasy sense that these poets are likely to converse with each other
only in one's own head, that to each other they might have little to
say. Trypanis and Durrell are both immensely literary poets with their
hearts set backward-looking in the same East Mediterranean post–
Byzantine world. Their line is the smooth cadence, their tone affection–
ate resignation. Berryman in the earlier poems in his volume, like the
magnificent "Winter Landscape," the bravely titled "2 September,
1939" (for there was Auden with that title too), the funny and savage
"A Professor's Song," is Audenesque in a good sense, the poetical critic
and appreciator of a culture, but moving from an eclectic stylistic
adroitness to a more personal, baffling, disjointed manner of his own.
Miss Garrigue is a much more direct poet, finely indifferent to the
thought of staiIces and strategies, or her stance and strategy, rather,
that of an abundant drinker and celebrator of life. Louis Zukofsky,
in
this long poem, is seeing what can be done with Pound and William
Carlos Williams in relation to a setting in American history more rooted
than Pound's but more open to the European past
than
Williams'. His
little prose essays of many years,
Prepositions,
have an astonishing con–
cision, honesty and directness. At the same time it is hard not to see
him, to see all the older poets in this group, as part of history, samples
of a "period." Even Robert
Creel~y
has acquired a recognizability
which is partly the recognizability of a manner. We say, "How typically
