Volume 4, Number 3 · March 11, 1965
White Goddess and Black Sheep
By Robert Mazzocco
Man Does, Woman Is
by Robert Graves
Doubleday, 74 pp., $3.95
The Mad Islands and The Administrator, Two Radio Plays
by Louis MacNeice
Oxford, 112 pp., $4.25
There are ten pieces or so in Graves's latest volume which I think he will want to preserve in any future editions of Collected Poems. The rest, to greater or lesser degree, show a falling off, manner without manna, so to speak, as here, the unconsciously comic (the poet is addressing a woman): 'Light as a bird now, you descend at dawn/ From the poplar bough or ivy bunch/ To peck my strawberries…,' or, 'Befriend us, Time, Love's gaunt executor!' These poems conclude a sequence Graves began a few years back and which—as he notes in that decorous old-fashioned lingo seemingly employed simply not to be in fashion—dramatize 'the vicissitudes of poetic love,' love walking 'on a knife-edge between two different fates'—love requited and unrequited, presumably. Of course, right now, and at long last, Graves is very much 'in.' By poets of the Movement, for instance, he is frequently invoked when set against the gloomy bulwarks of modernism.
Review, 2241 words
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