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BOOKS
151
FREE AND UNEASY
POEMS: SELECTED AND NEW, 1950-1974.
By Adrienne Rich. Norton.
$8.50.
THE SLEEPING LORD AND OTHER FRAGMENTS.
By David Jones.
Chilmark. $7.95.
POEMS
4. By Alan Dugan. Atlantic-Little Brown. $6.50.
TRILOGY.
By Diane Wakoski. Doubleday. $6.95.
WRITINGS TO AN UNFINISHED ACCOMPANIMENT.
Atheneum.
$3.95.
POEMS OF BLACK AFRICA.
Edited and with an introduction by Wole
Soyinka. Hill and Wang. $4.95.
About thirteen or fourteen years ago, I had the pleasure of
meeting Ms . Rich, first in Rochester and la ter at the LA. Richardses
when I was visiting Harvard. I remember that on the first occasion we
had a joke about the one slightl y improper joke in
Fanny Hill
("Any
port in a storm"). She was a trim, elegan t, charming person, making
much ·the same impression on me as an early volume of her verse I had
reviewed in England. Our seriou s conversation was technical, about
the difficulty and fascination of translating Dutch poetry. The person
in this book and in the photograph on the back of its dust jacket, is
much more formidabl e. Some of the poems go back as far as 1950 wh en
I must simply, beguiled by tact and craft, have missed how strong they
were.
But it is true that the mark of the earliest poems was elegance, by
which I mean doing something graceful and difficult without appear–
ing to try: as in " Ideal Landscape" from her 1955 volume:
We had to take the world as it was given:
The nursemaid si tting passive in the park
Was rarely by a changeling prince accosted.
The mornings happened similar and stark
In rooms of selfhood where we woke and lay
Watching today unfold like yesterday.
We think at first: "How deftl" And then: "Too much early- mid-period
Auden?"
