LANDMARKS: A BOOK OF SONNETS AND OTHER POEMS.

By William PlumerFowler '21. Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1954.70 pp. $2.50.

Appledore, Smuttynose, Duck, Cedar, and Malaga: they are islands in the Atlantic off Maine. Star, Londoner's, White Island, and Seavey's: they are off New Hampshire. Blown by gales and hammered by breakers, these nine, the Isles of Shoals, were once celebrated by Celia Thaxter, a lighthouse keeper's daughter who spent most of her 59 years on the tiny granite archipelago. They are celebrated again by a Boston lawyer who lives in Little Boar's Head and commutes, William P. Fowler, who startled the rugged men of his era when as a DOC athlete he walked more miles in one day than any Dartmouth man ever had. To his class, 1921, he has become a legend bordering on the apocryphal.

Landmarks is not the only literary mark which Mr. Fowler has made on the land of New Hampshire. It is his third book of poems. Flashing Wings appeared in 1941; GraniteLedges, 1943. In them all he curtails his undergraduate ambulatory expansiveness and confines himself largely to that tight verse form, the sonnet. The titles of the 46 poems suggest at once his emphasis and his range. In the first section called "Landmarks" one finds "At Godfrey's Ledge" and "Riding on a Sandy Beach at Sunset," "VernaL Equinox" and "Lady's Slipper" (the Cypripedium, you understand, with a pouch-shaped lip found in woods rather than in boudoirs). In the second section, "Man-Marks," he has a poem about a Dartmouth professor who wore a beard, smoked gold-tipped cigarettes, translated Japanese hokku, and made an impression on the 1921 generation: Curtis Hidden Page, nicknamed Concealed (1870-1946). Two pages away there is "Warper of Souls," a German who professed in quite a different fashion: Adolph Hitler, who, Mr. Fowler states, outdid even Judas. Mr. Fowler suggests in "To a Sculptor" that he prefers what Phidias gave Athens and Michael Angelo Rome.