SEVENTY NEW POEMS.

By Kimball Flaccus '33. Brattleboro (Vt.): VermontPrinting Company. First edition of 1000copies designed, published, and signed bythe author at Box 249, Swarthmore, Pa.9081. 107 pp. $5 (postpaid).

Kimball Flaccus is the sort of adventurer to interest Dartmouth men. In undergraduate life he played a leading role: prizes and honors in English, member of Green Key, Senior Fellow, President of the Arts, and varsity soccer player. With Nelson Rockeeller '30 and Walter P. Chrysler Jr. '33, he edited the Arts Rare Books Publications, and, alone, the Arts Chapbooks. Awarded the Richard Crawford Campbell Jr. '21 Travelling Fellowship, he did research in Ireland and there acted in the Gate Theater. At the City College of New York, he was the originator and curator of the Phonooraphic Library of Contemporary Poets. A Navy officer, he served in Alaska, was assigned as Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff, U.S. Naval War College in Newport, and at the U.S. Navy Intelligence School became a Naval Intelligence Specialist.

After the War he taught at Hunter College, the New York University School of Commerce, Pratt Institute, and Greensboro College and has become a free-lance lecturer and writer. He has done much research on Edgar Lee Masters.

Members of the Flaccus generation who remember the lyric fervor of his nature poems may find it again in 1969 more debonairly expressed. "Old Leopard Spring" plays with the metaphors of spots and recurrent nuzzling and pouncing among green and brown leaves. "Spring" is not only green; it is pink with honeysuckle, white with apple blossoms, gold with forsythia and daffodil, tea rose and tulip. The difference today is the addition of "sweet hair" of the woman he loves, suggested by the scent of the flowers. One poem concerns itself with a different green, that of the woman's eyes, and his "green calls to the green" in her.

Mr. Flaccus has a painter's eyes: "The Night Cat is a White Cat," New Hampshire "clapboards brown as honey," a black crow, a powder-blue heron, a scarlet tanager, and rainbow trout. An emphasis on color may be misleading. The 1969 poet has greater range than in the 1930's. One finds a poem to John Cowper Powys, an inquiry about how Shakespeare lived in the era of Marlowe and Raleigh, a lament about the hell of a New York summer, quotations from Emerson and Thoreau, nostalgia for Deer Island (Maine) and the Florence streets he once walked, delight in an eighteenth-century chair, a playful conjecture about sheep in an eighth-century Irish illuminated parchment, joy in his nakedness in South Carolina surf, and the grandeur of Angel Falls in Venezuela.

The 1968 Flaccus whimsically borders sometimes on the grotesque. A faithful woman [shades of John Donne!] may be compared to a dinosaur munching on fernlike trees or a tiger lurking in asparagus or a chimpanzee in a pink automobile with his arm about two blondes. With a borrowed Lieutenant Flaccus dollar, a dead flying friend may buy a double whiskey in Hell. "The sea is masculine in tide and gale; But in its liquid ardor is female." The love affair in which he gives himself naked to the ocean has perhaps more authenticity and vigor than is found in some verses dedicated to assorted women. One reader at least is tempted to suggest that Kimball Flaccus is at his best praising the gracefulness and loveliness of assorted cats.