GUARDED BY WOMEN.

By Robert Pack'51. New York: Random House, 1963. 79pp. $3.50.

Robert Pack is a parablist of the personal life. The first person singular echoes through his verse as he meditates on the deeper implications of outwardly ordinary experiences. It is part of his method that the experience is usually, though not always, seen as past, and has its meaning in the perspective of reflection.

The shooting of an otter "for fun," a fishing excursion with his father long ago, before "his tricked heart sucked like a fish/At the bland air," lovers in a field, a meditation on the "nourished house" he lives in with "wife, two dogs, children to come," give rise to insight and, sometimes, to a desire to escape from history (not, in these poems, Nietzsche's nightmare, but a sorrowful and ironic thing) into the "geologic quiet" of the fossil hermit crab or the peace of the "stone ... without desire."

This volume is full of memorable things and Pack has achieved what is indispensable for a poet - a voice and a perspective of his own. To mention only two poems, "Father" and "The Shooting" are very good indeed.

Assistant Professor of English