WELCOME TO THE CASTLE

Hayes is not a great poet- his verse is too long and too wordy; but it is not weak, it is virile both in substance and in its command of language. The author of several novels (The Girl on the Via Flaminia, etc.) devotes this book of poems chiefly to a soldier's experience in Italy, and he has a deep feeling for this wounded land and for its common people. The second half of the volume is devoted to poems of family life and middle age, and it conveys very well the slack halfheartedness and lack of direction of the postwar period... The verse report of a liberal, for that audience chiefly.