RICHARD EBERHART: SELECTED POEMS 1930-1965.

By Prof. RichardEberhart '26. New York: New Directions,1965. 115 pp. $1.75 (paperback).

It is good to see this book; one hopes it will find as many readers as it deserves. A gathering of the best of Eberhart, it is, as one might expect, a rich and satisfying collection. All the justly well-known favorites are here, scattered among the more than one hundred poems from previous volumes; in addition, the book contains twelve hitherto uncollected poems, including those occasioned by the assassination of President Kennedy.

Perhaps, since space is so limited, the best way to introduce the volume would be to let the poet speak for himself. "Poetry," he has remarked to an interviewer (in Shenandoah, Summer 1964), "has to be an engagement of the whole personality, the whole being you know; the heart is quite as important as the head. But I wouldn't say that either is more important. I think it's the whole suffering, living, breathing organism that has to work upon the world and make a poem if it can."

The statement is apt, for Eberhart's poetry impresses one as the work of a man vitally engaged with the passing moment, whose poems are records of continued efforts to understand the life within and without. In language of unadorned directness he probes experience to see what meaning there may be in it (never doubting that there is meaning, if it could be found). Despite occasional perplexities, the dominant tones are affirmative.

Department of EnglishUniversity of Massachusetts