THE OLDEST APRIL

by Sarah Litsey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1956

This is a pleasant volume of poems of sentiment and sensibility. Most of them have already appeared in Good Housekeeping, The Saturday Evening Post, The New York Times and Herald Tribune and several avant garde magazines. The author, a Kentuckian now living in New England, has a fine sense of place, a love of nature, of gardens, and a kind of half-fascinated, half-terrified sense of the modern mechanistic world which is ""taking over"" nature. She has also a delicate sense of personal relations and two of her most deeply felt and successfully formed poems are to her mother and her son. But where she fails is exactly there, in passion and incisiveness. One feels that, sensitive as she is, with deeper, more ardent feeling, she might have a greater mastery over form. Her technique is uncertain; the rhythms and metres have an occasional amateurishness and their music leaves the reader unsatisfied. She is an admirer of Elinor Wylie, but is still far from Miss Wylie's expert and crystal style which makes her poems so memorable. This is, however, a sensitive and charming book. It is doubtful if its market will go much beyond that of the small, dependable devotees of verse.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1956

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Golden Quill Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1956

Categories: NONFICTION