THE MAYFIELD DEER

Pulitzer Prize Winner, poet and novelist, Mark Van Doren has long been interested in running down folk material. The story of the old frontiersman whose pet deer had been killed and who threatened instant death no matter when or where he found the killer, was told him in slightly different versions and with different locales, evidence of folk lore in the making. And that story forms the basis of this strange narrative poem of frontier life, of revenge, and fear, of the hunter and the hunted-and of an ending that is his own. There are fine passages, and others that seem a bit tenuous, monotonous. There is less of variety in the verse form than one might wish, and the pace seems too deliberate for the ultimate substance of the theme. A rather limited market, I should think.