THE VAUDEVILLE MARRIAGE

Bennington '53, currently teaching at Fordham, Sandra Hochman wrote a first volume of poems which was the 1963 publication of the Yale Series of Younger Poets; other poems have been printed in many periodicals. This collection of verse centers more or less on the break-up of an early marriage, swings back into childhood, into other countries, and later loves, and throughout reflects a modern intelligent woman's sense of profound loneliness, and a seeking beneath the flat surfaces of present day trivia for love and being. The jerky, conversational style, in which a defensive sophistication is mixed with a childlike anguish, is sometimes non-poetry in control or form; but the tension between brittle phrases and raw emotion is painfully effective as an evocation of lost love in an impersonal age.