THE NECESSITIES OF LIFE

In this third volume of poetry (The Diamond Cutters, Snapshots of a Daughter--in-Law), Miss Rich is again preoccupied with the personal experiences of being a wife and mother, but also an individual. Most of these poems are attenuated both in feeling and in form, as if the subject were still too new to be coherent; poems dealing with a sudden sense of privacy and self, all interior, are followed by lyric notations on love, and a child, that have an odd, shy, literary quality despite their skill. Miss Rich is gifted in her use of words, but an emotional reserve deflects her best powers. At the end of the book are translations by Miss Rich of poems by several Dutch poets; all of them are pleasant, and (despite different subject matter) bear a family resemblance to those of their translator.