GRAFFITI.

By Ramon Guthrie. New York:Macmillan, 1959. 72 pp. $1.00.

The voice of Professor Guthrie's book is rumbling, often hesitant, seldom rhythmical, sly, terse, and merry - much, in fact, like its author's own voice for reading his poems aloud. Because he came to Dartmouth in 1930, many alumni out of the two intervening decades will easily be able to authenticate the sound of this familiar voice in their ears' memories. Even when he does trouble to make rhymes and regular line length, Professor Guthrie's particular timbre and tempo enfold them and make his whole sentences come out his way. So the voice is characteristic, and so is a wealth of wild, random accuracies strung along these stringy sentences. Again and again we are stopped short at curiosities like this:

"... and the mantissa had a cobra shape, jade and intractable, like biting on pearl in an oyster...."

When we consider that the mantissa is "the tag end of a logarithm and, in its primary meaning, a remainder or make-weight," we find ourselves delightedly nowhere and not bothered because we are.

Most of the poems are built more around a central theme or along a crazy plot than the one which contains the mantissa image, but almost all of them depend upon this abrupt, personal accuracy. The poems are clever. They are in the best sense contrived. They smile at their own successes and, at book length, make apparent a most extraordinary imagination. And it certainly is not a professional one. We are told its dreams of a catch of mermaids off Maine, of Senorita Conchita de la Miranda, the amazing lady non-bullfighter, of three bare-bottomed fates, and of much more.

The inexpensiveness of the volume is explained by the fact that Graffiti is one of five volumes chosen. to inaugurate a significant series by Macmillan, new poetry paperbound and printed in unheard of numbers that Dartmouth men, in this case, are expected to deplete alarmingly. Mentioning that the book is dedicated to Dilys and Alexander Laing should stimulate sales even further.