Mr. Stock is in his early forties and has been published widely in the little magazines; this is his first collection of poetry in book form. He is also the practitioner of a language nearly as baffling as ""twas brillig, and the slithy toves"" etc. For example, ""Poem on a Holy Saturday (for Harriette)"" states that ""Constellated as the air in its eunuch year;/ winter breaks its groom and bride of flower."" This deliberate-obscurity, full of recondite words and allusions, tends to halt rather than heighten the poetry's flow of fantasy. Love, some interesting ideas, a long poem of the death of a poet-friend in the Andes, often trip over and become enmeshed in a language as tangled as the South American Jungles, myths and literary allusions which fill these poems. There is power and imagination, but the deliberate avoidance of simplicity becomes trying, and what might have been lyric is often self-conscious, enigmatic.