Misery, it seems has had a cathartic effect on the Advocate. Buffeted and bruised by scissors-and-paste contributors and an overly-genteel printer who couldn't spell, the magazine has emerged from a bleak Winter bright in cover and content. In fact, the May issue is both balanced in material and extremely readable as well.

The Advocate's story contest has added a great deal to the issue. Two of three stories which won prizes are well-written and entertaining. My only argument with the Advocate in its choosing Joyce Leonard's Hand to the plow and Donald Stewart's Dennis Gray for the first two awards is a disagreement in the order of preference. I think that Stewart's is the better story.

In Dennis Gray, he describes a schoolboy's shock to a first confrontment with homosexuality and abnormal punishment. Dennis Gray, a student in a small prep school, is a finely-drawn character, whose nerves tighten at every small crisis. The tremendous tension created in a single afternoon snaps his recuperative mechanism so that he must build it all over again. Stewart's style in this piece is especially interesting, since he changes it sharply at the climax, switching from a rambling impressionistic picture to sharp realistic prose. This method is well meant, but I think it tends to weaken the story structurally. The impressionism overbalances the beginning, making the conclusion, in contrast, almost weightless. But outside of this stylistic contention, I can only praise Stewart's sensitive and thoughtful treatment of a difficult plot.

Hand to the plow, which won the first prize, boasts a very clear, almost slick style. This macabre story of a subtle murder, emblemished with crisp dialogue and painstaking detail, seems like a strange marriage of Edgar Allen Poe and Hamlin Garlin. Miss Leonard has constructed her slice of horror carefully and correctly, slipping the stilleto in exactly the right place at the right time. Although this is a cool, professional job, it does not have the strength of personal involvement that the Stewart story has.

Friday philharmonic, Lily prize winning piece, attempts to penetrate the thoughts of an old dowager. However, I could never see Miss Emmet's main character as an old woman: rather her emotions are always too youthful. The physical description of the woman seems to frame a personality nearer Miss Emmet's age. Besides this, the plot itself is too loose and rambling.

Anabel Handy's Late completes the Advocate's compelement of stories, Miss Handy deals in a man's reminiscence of a childhood incident; and while she obviously wants this incident to express a symbolic decision, I must confess that I can't see it. I thing that the author's involved verbiage has obscured the point, at least for me.

Like the stories, the Advocate's poem are varied in subject matter and generally good. A section of Gerald Fitzgerald Garrison Prize poem, In Praise of Wisdom, has been included in the issue. Without the body of the work, this section is a bit pointless and certainly seems isolated, but one can still enjoy its phonetic merits. Fitzgerald's poem, I from this section, is a praise of God's power and omnipotence.

Charles Neuhauser's Easter 1952 also rests on a religious basis. In has voicing of Christ's saving uniting force, Neuhauser employs an effective and ingenious play on words.

Two short bits of poetry, David Chandler's Explorator and Benjamin LaFarge's In Memory, are competent and interesting. Chandler's poem is the more colorful of the two. The only really inept piece in the issue is George Kelly's Liptight My Thoughts, two pages of senile mutterings.

Kelley's review of Tito and the Cominform by Adam B. Ulan is a little better. For most of the review, however, Kelley merely repeats Ulan's theses. He also seems to have a deadly fascination for the semi-colon, a choice punctuation he uses at least ten times. This plus a few colons makes the review difficult and often run-on reading. The other review, on Ghost and Flesh by William Goven, contains some excellent critical writing.