NEW ENGLAND SONNETS, ONE HUNDRED SONNETS SELECTED AND REVISED BY THE AUTHOR WITH A FOREWORD BY OGDEN NASH.

By William Plumer Fowler '21. Boston:Branden Press, 1966. 126 pp. $5.00.

In 1919 Bill Fowler won a Dartmouth Outing Club gold medal for hiking 681 miles in one year. In 1920 with Sherman Adams '20 he broke all D.O.C. records by walking 83 miles in one day from Skyline Farm, Littleton, to Lyme, via Breezy Point Trail, Moosilauke, and Warren. With law of fices in Boston and New Hampton, N. H., with frequent side excursions to Hanover, Bill can hardly be called today a stick-in-the-mud.

Such expansiveness might lead one to conjecture that he favors epics and heroes with seven-league boots. On the contrary, it is the sonnet, among the tightest of verse forms: fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, a total of 140 syllables, with occasional spondess, trochees, anapests, and dactyls thrown in for change of pace and emphasis.

The volume is appropriately named, with poems devoted to lady's-slippers and elm trees, cods and crabs, Lafayette and Monad-nock, ski slopes and cowbells, chipmunk and pheasants, Mount Desert and the Isles of Shoals, bayberries and dragon flies, kelps and clams, beach plums and blueberries dories and ducks.

Nature predominates, but there are references to Dartmouth men, Richard Hovey and Curtis Hidden Page, and to non-Dartmouth men, Petrarch and Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, Keats and Wordsworth

Professor of English Emeritus