Carrion Ground

THE POT OF EARTH--Archibald MacLeish--Houghton-Mifflin ($1.25). Death is the beginning of creation. Science explains: "The Nitrogen Cycle. . . ." Poet MacLeish says:

I tell you the generations Of man are a ripple of thin fire burning Over a meadow, breeding out of itself; Itself, a momentary incandescence Lasting a long time, and we that blase Now, we are not that fire, for it leaves us.

He sings the changes of the cycle in the life of a woman-one stony, first, as the reluctant earth, fearing the fire that moves, the force that brings lilacs out of a dead stalk whose root, fed by death, feeds death again in the carrion ground. Her career is conventional. She loves, marries and, dying, bears her child.

Sometimes the poem, submitting too much to manner, misses the rhythm which its theme imposes; equally often it rises, with an orchestration of dark vowel music, thrusting cadences, rich rhymes dexterously jarring, to utterance that will stamp Mr. MacLeish, young Boston Irishman, as an important poet to all those who attach importance to perfection of expression.

* MR. TASKER'S GODS--T. F. Powys--Knopf ($2.50).