THE QUARRY.

By Richard Eberhart '26.New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.114 pp. $4.75.

Of those American poets who began publishing in the 1930's, it is surely Richard Eberhart who commands the most respect today. His latest book will enhance his stature and delight his readers.

Among the varied poems in this volume are some interesting and not equally successful experiments in form, diction, sound, and meter. More frequent, however, are those poems which develop the meditative strain in which Eberhart has long excelled. It is one of this poet's triumphs to have found his strength early and to have retained it through the years; the reader can detect influences - Blake, Wordsworth, Whitman, Stevens - but the voice and style are uniquely and distinctively Eberhart's.

Love and death are major recurrent themes in these meditative poems. Many, like the early, famous, and characteristic "Groundhog" (pub. 1937), are prompted by experience and centered on the plight of man-in-nature, mortal and transient. Man-in-nature must constantly confront death, the more so as he loves life: "Acceptance is the beginning of wisdom," Eberhart insists. And love? In lines suggestive of Blake, Eberhart writes, "Individuation is the way to the universal, /Love is the symptom of life's energy." The poet finds his surest affirmation in the third major theme of his meditations, inseparable from the other two, poetry and the imagination:

And is art itself not a triumph of nature, Before the worm takes over, before the breakneck tomb?

Probably the finest Eberhart is this, the meditative poet who is most effective when he writes simply and directly in language charged with the urgency of expression, as in "Sea Burial from the Cruiser Reve." Such poetry is deceptively simple, precisely the sort that readers are sure they could write, if only they could spare the time. Simplicity like that of Eberhart at his best is, however, born of the highest art, for lesser skills will turn the direct, forceful style into the flat, prosaic statement. Although Eberhart, like any other fine poet, can have his moments of flatness, it is clear that his Quarry is deeply veined with the imaginative excitement of language that distinguishes poetry from scannable words.

Department of EnglishBrown University