On the Shelf

Unlike most of the recent issues, the latest Advocate's contents are as flimsy as the magazine itself. There is some excellent poetry by writers whose excellence has already been established; the remainder is poor fiction and a piece of long and well-written criticism which seems to have no raison d'etre.

Two poems are the best things in the new Advocate. "The House at the Cascades," by Adrienne Rich, is as clean, tight, and refreshing as Miss Rich's previous work. She writes of a house going to ruin, and does so with remarkable unpretentiousness: "The tamest shrub remembered anarchy, and joined in appetite with the demagogue weed . . ." The other, "Digging for China," by Richard Wilbur, is simple and evocative; Wilbur's clarity should inspire some of the Advocate's more obscure writers to intense self-examination.

The rest of the Advocate is mediocre. James Chace's "The Mariner," a story about a little boy in a sailboat who finds a body, is a humid mass of sensory impressions thrown like a wet rag at the reader; the boy, boat, and body get lost in the flood. William Morgan's "The Cowgirl" is a long synoptic anecdote about a girl from Alabama who goes to New York with a man named Goldstein and ends up shooting at him through a bathroom door. The humor of the piece hangs largely on the contrast between the girls' quaint narrative style and that of Mr. Goldstein; the girl spends a great deal of time emphasizing that her first husband was one of "the greatest housepainters that ever lived." This goes on for five pages and is not very funny.

Longest and most ambitious piece in the magazine is a criticism of Richard Wilbur's poetry by Donald Hall. Hall obviously knows what he is talking about and makes his case with a minimum of clutter, although he occassionally lapses into technical obscurity. ("Zeitgeist," incidentally, a term which Hall tosses around with aplomb, means "the spirit of the time"--this reviewer had to look it up and you might have to too.) Whether anybody cares if Hall thinks Wilbur will be remembered as a major twentieth century writer is another question.

The Advocate is admittedly writing for a limited (and literary) audience. But by printing material on so esoteric a subject as Hall's it would seem that it is limiting that audience too much; no matter how effective Hall's case, it will appeal only to people who have the necessary literary equipment to appreciate it. This writer, for one, doesn't.