Brady's Bend and Other Ballads

MARTHA KELLER catches the romance and humor and pathos of pioneering life and of historical figures because she is a true ballad writer in her selection of one episode.

A poet who can, for example, build serious tragedy out of an event in the early life of President Buchanan commands our awe. The book is crowded with characters, famous or obscure, who perform one act indelibly before our eyes. The backgrounds are no less remarkable. In such a poem as “Foreclosure" she gives us that sense of antiquity older than Egypt which we feel in coming across the tree-grown cellar hole of some vanished house or some ancient headstone too often deciphered by the inquiring weather.

Yet she is also a learned poet, well-read and accomplished. Much of the book is not in the folk manner. The more conventional lyrics are sometimes as good as the ballads. Miss Keller does not flaunt direct influences, but here a phrase or there an angle of inspection brings to mind one of a diverse company of poets: Longfellow, Lindsay, Masters, Kipling, Hardy, Housman, Stephen Benét. In some of the ballads, especially “Brady’s Bend,”we feel the desirability of reading aloud, as we do in Lindsay’s work. “Brady’s Bend” is an experiment the effect of which will be lost if each accent is not stressed hard in staccato beat and set off by pauses. The accents must come like hammer blows and strict attention must be paid to the tempo. The more contemplative poems suggest Hardy or Housman; Housman seems to be a direct influence in some of the elegiac war poems — “Firing Squad,”for example.

The poems are not all on the same level. Miss Keller can write badly. “Drum Music” is very poor; it is in that synthetic soldier-talk which makes a former soldier feel embarrassed. Sometimes she overdoes alliteration or indulges a rather annoying trick of half-pun, half-echo. These faults glare in such a monstrosity as “Innate, inborn, inbred itinerancy,” a line whose ineptitude throws one into a rage. However, all the ballads and character sketches provide ample recompense, as do such lyrics as “Funeral March,” “Headstone,” “Small Choice,” “Hemlock, Hawthorn, and Juniper,” “Wreath,” “Love Knot,” “Foreclosure,” “Dead March,” “Second War,” “Manhattan Project.” The long poem at the end, “Search for Tomorrow,” is an uneven philosophical ode and would warrant more discussion than a brief review affords.

Taken all in all, Brady’s Bend is indubitably an important book.

ROBERT HILLYER