Audience

Literary quarterlies are plagued by excesses of slide projector poetry, that brand of literature which will stand scrutiny but not reading. Fortunately, the current Audience is an exception; it has more than enough sound rich work to make it so.

Choice among the poetry selections are George Starbuck's Poems For a First Year in Boston (dedicated to Jonathan Edwards on the bicentenary of his death): "I. New Year: Arrival from San Francisco," "II. Olympus Having Weathered One More Winter in Boston," "III. Boston: Progress Report." The seven pages of verse are luxurious with alliterations, line and internal rhyme, and rhythmic variety, yet rarely seem splashy. Moreover, Starbuck has successfully used slang to aid rather than preclude intelligibility. The sense of the well sustained poem is a rare combination of sophistication and humanitarianism--a "Wasteland" reconsidered, as it were, featuring Boston, Jonathan Edwards and the poet.

Also more rather than less in the aural tradition are two chapters from the novel Cadenza by Ralph Kusack. Each is an episode about childhood in Ireland full of color and suspense. There are times when Kusack's grammar gets the better of the reader, but at least the prose is rarely flat. Description procedes with abrupt transitions and gives an effect resembling the flicker in old movies, but the technique suits the generally continuous action and falters only in a few waiting scenes.

After the standard set by Starbuck, it would be difficult for poetry in any single edition of a magazine to look good. James Wright, in "The Thieves," has filled four stanzas with round and rolling sounds, which, appeaing as they sometimes are when taken one or two phrases at a time, present confusion together. However, two poems by Stephen Sandy come to rescue readers from the rain of apples in Wright's poem. Both are very tightly written, exotic pieces: "Moulay Ismail and King Louis' Daughter," and "Near Marrakech." The second of these is particularly ingenious and vivid.

Thomas Weisbuch, like Sandy, contents himself in "The Last Letter to Monsieur Falbriard" with tracing a neat image, although the poem suffers from one or two technichal mistakes, confusions of grammar and image. Still, Weisbuch is capable of turning phrases as clean as "The grass that blazed/Each morning out by my window." He is the only undergraduate printed in this issue.

Rounding out the poetry selections are four satires by Firman Houghton--those on Whitman and Houseman are especially funny--and an amusing "sick, sick, sick" poem by Daniel Langton called "A Modern Poem." They are skillful space fillers. Anne Sexton has five poems printed: all are sentimental--"And that's the Way it Was" inversely so. "The Exorcists" redeems itself in places and "Hutch" looks as if it ought to sound nice.

One of the two remaining short stories, Lore Groszmann's "Mrs. Geiger's Night Out," works from a weak beginning into a strong portrait of a massively silent old woman. The other, Millie Starr's "Crazy Sunday," would be fine but for the fact that Salinger has done it all before and better.

The magazine is worth its price for Starbuck alone, but there's more. John W. Loofbourow interviews the Poets' Theatre personified in an enlightening dialogue marred only by a pedantic reference to Latin drama in the Elizabethan universities. Of 21 or so drawings by Joyce Reopel, Kaffe Fassett, Zero Mostel, Arthur Polonsky, Lynn Schroeder, Jane Nichols, John Wilson, and Renzo Grazzini, more kind words might be said, but that would require another review.

For those who care, there are two photographs.