Cold Morning Sky

by Marya Zaturenska

[Macmillan, $l.50]

To find a book that is luminous with quiet joy, with ’beauty water-bright,’is to believe again in that morning discovery of flowers, of light and shade, of love and sorrow, which one’s first delight in poetry, in music, and in nature awoke. With sincerity and skill Marya Zaturenska renews this belief and this pleasure through her poetry. At least she did for me, who read between three and four thousand poems a month, and she evidently did for the Pulitzer Prize judges who heard her poetry’s delicate music above conversations at midnight and other laments.

The title of her book, Cold Morning Sky, reveals one quality of her writing — cool open lucidity; but it does not indicate the iridescence that tenderness and beauty give even to her poems of terror. ‘Her world’s weather’ is clear and bright and full of beautiful silences, but it has its spells of cloud and clamor too.

This is poetry that would be recognized as poetry in any age; its lyricism is common to many. One can easily hear in its music, for example, the fresh golden liquidity of Sir Philip Sidney — especially in ’Water and Shadow’; and see in its images the mystical intensity of Blake. Yet the voice, the spirit, is her own, with a wonderful simplicity, an almost classical purity, a half-childlike innocence blended with feminine wisdom, that lift her poetry into its own sky. No one could paint with more loving exactness the daisy, or make one see more greenly, more luxuriantly, the waving wonder of the common grass. But Marya Zaturenska does not live a pastoral or a cultivated dream; she knows the diminishing dream and waking nightmares of city life. She knows also terror and death, and the scarecrow behind the human face.

If it is innocent to believe still in joy and beauty, hers is the innocence of a mind that clings to what is good, but does not hide in ignorance and fear of what is evil. It is profoundly and simply moving to find in these poems the warmth, the strength, the experience of a woman, a mother. It is not by literary accident that she dedicates one of her poems to D. H. Lawrence, and that one is written of ‘Angel-Infancy ’ — that

But the feminine sensitiveness and feeling are always restrained; there is here no wearing of either an illusioned or a disillusioned heart on a consciously bared arm.

In form the poems are so beautifully controlled that their technique never interferes with one’s first pleasure in what they say. The intellectual delight one gets from seeing metre and rhyme and stanzaic structure gracefully and expertly managed is constantly quickened. In ‘Water and Shadow,’ for example, there is a beautiful circling back at the end to ’the long flow of green and silver water’ and ‘the shadow of the mountains’ which sweep one into the poem. In ’Spring Morning’ the rare, difficult device of identical rhyme is delicately and effectively used to echo the flow and ebb of the morning light, the water, the joy in love. In ‘Season in Snow.’ the delight in words, the play with them in internal rhymes and repetition, are frank but never tricky. In poem after poem the closing lines are full of the beauty of quiet, achieved by modulated vowels as well as by images —

The whole book is alight with ‘the moons and waters of the mind’ — a mind so sensitive, attractive, and gifted that it brings even to proseparched readers a waking enchantment.

MILDRED BOIE