against each other and react.

Wax doll tries to act

among the paper celluloid.

Doll, I can no more than watch

the others moving; I am wax

and pull back, can't react.

So genial, so temperate, the puppet-dance of "humanoid" and "celluloid" but never the anarchy of unmeaning ragged syllables. Is it unfair to ask for a little brain spread on the table?

Then there is the artifice of diffusion, that lively apologist for lives as well as works. Peggy Rizzo, who is quite talented, still managers to leave her "Three Studies from the Bridge" in a confusion, fine passages ("rain loosening from the leaves," "thoughts neved and birthed in the flesh of words") tumble together with passages buoyed by neither wisdom nor sound (I moved to dreams unpeopled, but birded"). There exists then no poem but only favored portions; there is no totality to like or dislike, certainly none to analyze. Something is perversely appealing about this nonchalance, for too often here writers or directors claim integrity for works which have none, thereby forcing an appraisal which assumes precisely what they are trying to achieve and is inaccurate or confused to the extent that the assumption is. Still, to beg of the responsibility of proper formulations is to foreswear the possibility of creating more than suggestive phrases.

That the elements of a decent poem are so construed that they take meaning only in relation to the totality, indeed that the progressing of a poem can make unnecessary and even harmful the coagulation of inspiration, is proved, if it needed proving, by Rachel Hadas' exposition of a paradox in "Lucretius Widow Thinks Aloud." Miss Hadas adopts the epistemological methods of the rationalism she explodes and argues her case in spare language simply arranged:

You only wanted to get rid of fear

Put fear behind you and the sky is open,

you said, and fear was finally fear of itself

shattered and put together cleverly

with only love left out.

So the argument proceeds, convincing the ear before the meaning is fully catalogued. If it is not a great poem it is at least an interesting and superbly controlled one.

Like Miss Hadas' poem Dorcas' story is uncluttered with glosses to Lowell and Eliot and the assorted deities of last year's tutorial. This is probably so because, to judge from the numerous references to anthropology, the author concentrates in Folk Mythology.

There is no room here to give a sense of the story's wonderful place nor to indicate some of the marvelous flashes of originality. An entire epoch of a fascinating life has been dumped onto paper. It is blessing to find someone admit to love of good wood, to talk about concerts and buses after the dedicated artistry which burdens even the good material in the Advocate. Why, the price of admission would be well spent if it bought you nothing but an introduction to Mr. Dorcas' mind, whoever's mother's son he might be.