No doubt Eugene Dodds' cover for the April Advocate will boost the magazine's sales at the newsstands. Not only is it fresh and clever, but it very nearly blots out the name of the publication. If the cover of the new issue is hard to read, however, the content is generally straightforward and four of the pieces are good.

The best of the month's fiction is the work of a graduate Junior Fellow Geoffrey Bush. His "A Great Reckoning in a Little Room" combines, to considerable dramatic affect, imagined selections from Christopher Marlowe's diary and letters. Bush has caught the spirit of two men one an iconoclast and a great author, the other a conformist and his betrayer.

Down several notches but also effective is "The Boy Those Father Owned a Barn" by James Bucchler. The descriptive passages are sharply sensory; the reader smells the kitchen and warms to the stove. But to accomplish this, Bucchler loads every noun with adjectives, so that the few action passages are heavy and slow.

Yet both these stories succeed because they inspire interest and sympathy for their characters. After finishing Carl Saper's "The Hammerklavier," however, the reader only confused and annoyed. The one exception to this one's clarity, Saper's psychological piece treats the strange behavior of a young man at his brother's piano concert. Even allowing for the mental aberrations exhausted in this type of story, "The Hammerklavier" is incomplete. Ralph, Waddy, and the mother emerge only as unreal people in a jumbled and embarrassing dream.

Professor I. A. Richards' lucid essay, "The Idea of a University," seems out of place among the fiction. A thoughtful argument for returning to Plato's synoptic view of education, this material was first presented at an Eliot House symposium. Evidently the Advocate is reprinting Richards' text to bring it before a more limited audience.

Like the prose, the poetry ranges from good t disappointing. In "Jonathan Victus," Peter MacVeagh chose his theme with care, nurtured it through four fine stanzas, and then uprooted it poetically with a jarring last verse. Similarly, Benjamin La Farge, in his "letter To a Friend," includes phrases like "where old men snore" which may satisfy a demanding rhyme scheme but which destroy the tone of the poem.

"The Sermon on the Mount," translated from the Syrian by Tawfig Sayish, is overbalanced with strained imagery ("the sleepless fish make weary passes at the blushing corn") but it also conveys a dignity and sense of wonder. There can be little praise, however, for Peter Junger's "Sea Change," in which a trite subject is locked in an erratic meter.

Irving Yoskowitz also has selected a worn subject in his play let, "On Olympus." Cole Porter couldn't do much with Greek legend and Yoskowitz, whose "fertility, agility, virility" sequences are more Tom Lehrer than Porter, fares no better. If the play let was intended as comedy, there is none; if as poetry, the lover's one creditable speech near the need cannot redeem it.

Taken in all, however, the April Advocate is often worthwhile, and as clear as a Spring afternoon. This clarity is a welcome relief; it was a long winter.