NINETEEN DARTMOUTH POEMS.

Selected by Richard Eberhart '26 and AlexanderLaing '25. Wood engraving byStanley L. Rice '45. Hanover: DartmouthPublications, 1967. 31 pp. $2.

The authors are four recent graduates, ten seniors, one junior, and one sophomore. What moves them? What does not? Old-fashioned romantic love does not. An "angry young man" with a junkie as whore and a sense of humor is about to burn his library card. Last line: "It's a start." Without a capital letter or a mark of punctuation, a poem of 45 lines examines the lure of women (corrupting) and self-love (corrective). It is unlikely that another poet has a broken heart when he sensuously recalls a girl in a tight blouse running after a little rabbit.

Love of family? Mildly philoprogenitive, one undergraduate places in conjunction the death of a grandmother, a wife in labor, and a new-born infant, whose "breathing screams ... commands us all." A second regrets the death of another man's son from pneumonia and extols the healthy existence of his own who only coughs facetiously. The most surprising is perhaps a poet-son who expresses nostalgia for his mother capable of telling him fairy stories. He longs for her "withered lap" whereon he may cry himself "into quiet sleep at last."

Nature? One student tries to explain why in Spain the sun is so bright and the shadows so deep. Another hopes that Magalloway Mountain, abandoned by moose preferring the Laurentians, may revert to primitive wilderness.

The affluent society and slum areas? "Two Street Poems" consider (1) the Dutch elm disease in New Hampshire and (2) mail boxes which disappoint the author because when he drops "another bit" of his "soul" into their "maws" he gets no response other than "a complacent, metallic, swinging-shut burp." Still another street with a fish market, a fruit stand, and a bakery provides color and drama. Well-to-do persons condescendingly drop off Thanksgiving baskets for the poor. "Ode to a Four-Speed Box" praises a racing car capable of breakneck flight in a nocturnal and friendless hour.

„ Death? We may attend a funeral with rotting flesh" inside a "polished wood casket." War? Only in one poem. The children's joyous play of cowboys and Injuns is carried to sinister lengths in Vietnam.

Dartmouth purports to be a liberal arts college. What about studies and past civilizations? The best poem, "The Attic Head," suggests the mystery of the "frozen word sealed/Between the smooth stare/Of chiseled eyes/And the wayward/Look of youth." A second characterizes Tangier as "a naked and promiscuous bride of the North," who has enslaved both antiquity and modern times. A third begins, "I lie assassinated in the jungle of my ignorance."

One searches in vain for what one naively expects for stimuli: drugs and dreams, Negroes and race riots, President Johnson as social reformer and Far Eastern civilizing force, the soul and Madison Avenue. Conventional prosody is ignored. Missing are attacks on the tyranny of Dartmouth administrative officers and boastful assertions about the reliable maturity of undergraduates interested in emancipated girls and permissive parietals.

Despite the limitation in scope, however, one may be impressed with these poets' articulateness and experimentation, seriousness of purpose, and sophisticated humor and wit, sometimes bordering on the macabre.