and a bubble detaches.

"A Place for Us" by John Allman traces the movement of the poet's mind as it leaps back and forth between an immediate situation and an ominous vision. As he sits in a restaurant the poet embarks on unpredictable imaginative flights which confuse him and embarrass the girl sitting next to him. By placing the real and the imagined events side-by-side, Allman manages to capture the suddenness of the mental fluctuations wthout imitating their incoherence:   I order coffee,

You tell me not to bellow, and the waitress

Resents my struggle with a swelling ocean.

I reach to save you, and you pat my hand;

The waves subside; you whisper of commotion.

The Island's only fiction, "Grisha's Dream," by Gus Magrinat, is a vigorous little story about a moribund "retired intellectual." ("An intellectual is a man who has never forgotten his subconscious. A retired intellectual is an old man who, after years of grappling with himself, finds his intellect wandering like a knight errant and his appetites spent in a trickle of compulsions.") Magrinat's narrative is so engaging and moves so quickly that you are likely to find Grisha dead and the story finished before you realize that you've become pretty fond of the grandfatherly, lonesome eccentric.

The one boring inclusion in the Winter Island is an article about Theodore Roethke. If you know anything about Roethke you probably will not learn much from the article. If you have never heard of Roethke, his own prose is the best introduction. His essays are short, penetrating, and frequently amusing; much like the Winter Island.