THE BLUE ESTUARIES

For many years, Louise Bogan has been a critic and consultant on poetry for the New Yorker, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and other august institutions. She is also an award-winning poet in her own right. The poems in this collection, spanning close to a half century, have been drawn from five earlier volumes. There is a particular timelessness about all of them which derives from her restrained rhyme schemes and simple imagery and subdued emotional tone. Even the many love poems are thoughtful rather than passionate, less concerned with immediacy than with the re-evaluation of experience. At best subtle, occasionally diffuse, their coolness is a distinctive mark of a poet who has forged her own world in spite of changing poetic fashions.