Address to the Living

by John Holmes

[Henry Holt, $2.00]

THIS is a young man’s book — personal, full of quick sensory perceptions, and touched by both enthusiasm and doubt. It is also — and that shows on every page — the book of a young poet who loves poetry, and to whom the writing of poetry is neither an interesting mental exercise nor a substitute for pamphleteering, but a reason for life. There is a freshness and honesty of emotion about the best of his work that keeps it from being merely another book of poems, even when he writes conventionally or under influence, and there is also a vein of sub-acid satire that is as much a part of youth as its enthusiasms. It is characteristic of his mood and his mind to write

Not to the name of death over and over
But the prouder name of life is poetry sworn,

to make the last part of ‘The Green Door,’ like Brooke’s ‘The Great Lover,’ a catalogue of things personally loved:

I’ve stopped to light a pipe in woods in winter;
I’ve charged the surf that rolls on summer sand;
I’ve run the flag up, felt the long thin halyards
Tugging, and held the wind in either hand.

I praise the children and the fierce old women,
The graceful girls, the tall and ruddy men;
I praise them all with Jove, and in their faces
I think I see my love returned again,

but it is equally characteristic of him to write in ’Odd Moment’ of the man who ‘wrote in the dust upon the mirror, “Death, ” and to comment, with tart adroitness, in the section ‘Salt for Taste’:

Old men are full of zest and information,
And they remember all they ever thought.
Old men are vigorous in conversation.
Young men exist to listen and be taught.
Old men give dates that may not be disputed,
And they remember parts old actors played.
A young man’s fact is easily refuted:
He was not present when the world was made.

Those are the two sides of the double mirror of youth, and Mr. Holmes shows both of them, without pretense. It is not a loud voice, but it has humor, music, and candor — and it marks him among the younger poets of his time.

On the technical side. Mr. Holmes’s work is sound rather than experimental. I dare say he will be criticized by some for not being more experimental than he is and by others for not devoting himself exclusively to current politics. But such criticisms do not mean very much. You cannot borrow a technique or an emotion as you borrow a fountain pen — and there is a genuineness here that binds the whole book together. All that Mr. Holmes presents here is not entirely successful — but there is a spirit, a sharpness, a love of beauty, in bis best work that show him as somebody worth watching — and rereading.

STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT