VOYAGES DOWN and Other Poems

The author of these thirty-eight poems is that rare person, an English professor (Brown University) who is also a real poet, and can write new and moving poems about the academic life (as in ""The Graduate Reading Room""). Grading the ""papers of graduate students"" has not swamped either his interest or his talent; teaching, family life, marriage, being a fighter pilot, and literature, are all part of the world with which he is concerned, and by which he has been enriched. This civilized awareness is coupled with enthusiasm and a precise sense of imagery; even the poems about literary figures, such as John Keats and Emily Dickinson, are marvelously full of life and a fiery consciousness of the drama and tension of art versus life. There are other poems about the New England background, including a long, simply-told narrative poem about early whaling voyages. An earlier volume won the Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize in 1958. These unaffected, wide-ranging, cleanly-written poems are also highly attractive.