"Little" magazines usually achieve the most value when they present work by writers whose energy and mutual interaction will make literary history, or have already made it. The Boston Review doesn't represent a group. You have the feeling that its various contributors haven't gotten to know one another thoroughly, and that there may be fewer of them when they do. But at the core of this new magazine's first issue lies work by three extraordinary gifted poets who lived recently in Cambridge, interfertilized, and graduated from Harvard within a year or so.

Sidney Goldfarb '64 dominates the issue. A limecolored center section presents seventeen poems by the incomparable Sidney -- the barging personalist, the grizzled residumorph of a fat-boy complex who garnished two hundred pounds of soul with a Rasputinian beard, and converted a certain respect for violence into a poetry that is as idealistic as it is aggressive, and as sweet-tempered as it is visceral. The poems are followed by appreciative essays by Richard Tillinghast and Robert Grenier; both talk extraordinarily good sense about a poet who is so skilled in the arts of Personality that he sometimes denies us access to the poem itself.

If Goldfarb were a bad poet he would still be monumental; he is a good one, and magnificent. Tillinghast calls attention to a generously exploited strain of exhibitionism in the preceding verse:

Go ahead. Piece me together. Give me a buffalo's brain

And a butterfly's sense of smell, a bat's eye

A brama bull's balls and a possum's preoccupations.

You still don't recognize me, do you?

and Grenier declares Goldfarb "in his poetry, altogether spiritual." Yes, Goldfarb achieves fire and air by adopting and digesting the realm of earth and water -- viscera mundi. Alimentary metaphors reign:

I enter. So much muffled disbelief.

I am a glutton. I eat your pie.

Without warning...

I do everything with my hands.

I stuff my face with grapes.

I mulch them between my teeth.

Seeds run from my mouth and scatter carelessly