WHEN a poet writes a novel, he is generally accorded the amused attention elicited by a fish out of water, and the proverbial shoemaker and his last are recalled. Mr. Van Doren at no time runs the danger of such unflattering parallels, for as the readers of "The Transients" can well testify, he has earned renown as a novelist commensurate with that which he has gained as a critic and poet. And he has earned it, as he does now, by writing novels which can stand by themselves as mature and expert productions. If one discerns the poet in this novelist, it is because he brings to his work a sense of form and structure which other novelists might envy.

"Windless Cabins" does not deal, like "The Transients," with characters who are in any sense not of this world. Rural New England is again the scene, but Ray, the hero, is an attendant at a group of tourist cabins, white Lucy, the heroine, is an unhappy girl who lives nearby with an aunt whom she tries not to hate. To these people come first the shared experience of love, and later the problem of murder. A sleek and unctuons traveler tries in procuring him a girl, and then makes advances to Lucy. Ray unintentionally kills him, hides the body and attempts to decide how to tell Lucy of his crime. The rest of the book--more than half--is concerned with the growing breach between the lovers, caused by the unspeakable secret, and the ultimate disclosure, atonement and reconciliation.

There is maintained always a delicate balance between physical and mental action, for, in spite mind is the center of the book's development. Phy-of of the violent murder and its repercussions, Ray's sical action, as in "Macbeth," is both the cause and matter of the subsequent mental action. And "Macbeth" occurs also to Ray, as he leaves Lucy, unable to tell her of his horrible dream.

"Her firmness in refusing to look back gave him the firmness to say over and over in his mind the line that lodged there as he turned up to the camp. These terrible dreams that shake us nightly. These terrible dreams that shake us nightly. But if we tell them all they won't be terrible. And after a while they won't come nightly. Or shake us. Not if we hold each other and remember. These terrible dreams that shake us nightly. These terrible dreams that shake us nightly."

The story of Ray and Lucy is the story of the Fieries in another country. Their power is unshaken by the transplantation, and the stature of their victims undiminished.