GRANITE LEDGES

by William PlumerFowler '21. Bruce, Humphries, Inc. 1943,62 pp. $1.50.

Mr. Fowler has followed up his volume of poems, Flashing Wings, published three years ago, with another, similar to the first in subject-matter and form, but even more satisfying in finish, and has thereby proved his right to be numbered among Dartmouth's better poets. All who love New England's stern coastline and rugged inland mountains will enjoy these sonnets and lyrics.

Mr. Fowler has a sure touch, a fine feeling for rhythm, and a chaste sense of the exact meanings and suggestive connotations of words that enable him to clothe his simple and sincere emotions in the presence of Nature in highly effective verse. His range is narrow, but in that very narrowness lies his greatest power. The short but lovely shoreline of New Hampshire (with slight extensions into Maine and Massachusetts) forms the setting for his most appealing poems. Here, in clear descriptive terms and strong, controlled meter, the poet makes his reader see the fishermen, the clamdiggers, and the sunlit marshes of Hampton; hear the seagulls and the cormorants at Rye; feel the wind, the fog, and surf of the Isles of Shoals; and through it all catch glimpses of the immutable, eternal sea in contrast with man's transitory activities.

These sea poems are the best in the volume, but that is not to disparage the sonnets of the mountains, in which most Dartmouth men will discern nostalgically the genuine love of windswept summits, rock-strewn trails, and snow-covered ski slopes that stems un- doubtedly from Mr. Fowler's undergraduate days. And other tastes are uncovered in the more bookishly inspired sonnets "on the sonnet," on Greece, and even on the ancient cat.

There is, too, one specifically Dartmouth poem, written for the 20th reunion of the class of 1921.