THIS volume should attract attention if only for the reason that it contains the largest number of sonnets ever published under one cover. Records and superlatives of quantity could be applied to at endless length by anyone with a statistical turn of mind, and it is incontestably the major poetic and publishing tour de force of the year. But the reader should not confine his emotions to the sort which come from a first glimpse of the Empire State Building or the Queen Mary for in this titanic mass of reading matter there is a definite quality.

John Crowe Ransom said of Moore's first book of sonnets: "It is because Merrill Moore is an inevitable fountain of charming novelties that he has done what I doubt if any other living poet could do; and that is, to publish himself fully, delicately, and beautifully in a book composed entirely of sonnets, or quasi-sonnets." And the same might be said of this, his third book, ten times the length of the first.

The book is divided into ten parts with such titles as "Biographica," "The Anxiety of Love," "Dreams and Symbols," and "Time the Obsession." Not the least of the charms of this work are the piquant titles to the poems, beginning with "M," which includes the author's two initials and the Roman numeral for 1000. In his brief foreword Moore describes this as "a set of notes, memoranda, indices, jottings, case-histories, mal-adjustments and occasional solutions. When the work is completed the sonnets will finally fit into place, shaping the autobiography of a person of the period."

Dr. Moore is a successful psychiatrist practicing in Boston (and, incidentally, an assistant in Psychiatry at Harvard). He might be called the prototype of the Modern Man, with a tremendous range of interests and a technique of using and focusing them acquired from the efficiency of business methods. One cannot help being interested in the way in which life strikes his accurate mind in these thousand facets.