Volume 18, Number 11 · June 15, 1972
Undercurrents
By Robert Mazzocco
The Sense of Occasion
by Chester Kallman
Braziller, 65 pp., $2.95 (paper)
Earth Walk: New and Selected Poems
by William Meredith
Knopf, 94 pp., $1.95 (paper)
Uncommon is the word for Chester Kallman—uncommonly attractive and uncommonly odd. Probably no other poet of Chester Kallman's generation, the generation of 'the nineteen-twenties-born,' the generation which, as he mordantly remarks, 'had no name,' seems so singular, so dryly or vividly himself. And yet, for all that, no other poet, I think, seems, here and there, so quaint, so much the poor proverbial drunk endlessly searching for his wallet under the streetlamp although he lost it up the alley. Storm at Castelfranco and Absent & Present and The Sense of Occasion—certainly the three collections of his poems are arresting performances. And certainly a number of the poems grow better from book to book, poems full of nipping lines, of 'wry and borrowed ambiguities,' of contraries and conceits.
Review, 2386 words
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