Poetry

THE COCK OF HEAVEN--Elder Olson --Macmillan ($2).

That all flesh is as grass--and mostly crab grass at that--is a juicy writer's thesis that seems incapable of being squeezed dry. One of the latest literati to draw blood from this cosmic lemon is Elder Olson, a young, Byronic-looking assistant professor of English at Illinois Institute of Technology. His The Cock of Heaven is a long poem about the irremediable genesis, incorrigible exodus and appalling exeunt of the Goddamned, salvation-proof children of Adam. For purely literary excitement, it should rank as the poetic book-of-the-year.

According to a legend recounted by the lyth-Century poet and ecclesiastic. John Donne, the cock that crew thrice at Peter's denial of Christ --

(Cockcrow: one swears he knows Him not; Thence is a Church begot.)-- was the angel Gabriel in disguise--who crew also in Eden when Eve plucked the forbidden fruit, and will crow again ("in the days of great persecution of the Jews, and of intestine wars") when Satan, soul nauseated by his triumphant corruption of the world, prays God to put an end to mankind. Since Gabriel's first cockcrow, seven Messiahs have done their miraculous best to redeem mankind. But their efforts only went to convince Donne in the 17th Century--and only go to reconvince Olson in the 20th--"that to save this world God Himself must needs be born into it; and even then He can but make it worthy to be destroyed."

Olson brings out the design and freshens up the colors of this faded legend by putting it under the spotlight of today; turns it into a surrealistic cyclorama of human fate. In the foreground the seven deadly sins of Sloth, Gluttony, Envy, Lust, Avarice, Pride, Anger move like insatiable' ghouls through the golden haze of eternity. The background is left for the individual cyclorama-goer to fill in.

The martyr amid golden fires Cried out: "While Red Knight fought -with Black, The White Lady, with both their squires, Made the beast with double back; And while the great St. Austin preached, So air grew gold with angels' wings, A beggar scratched because he itched; I perish to amend these things, And while in blazing shirt I stand, Priest jostles knave in the dark street, Better to see my burning hand Fall off, and sputter at my feet."

But in spite of all mankind's devilry man still has a soul:

And what if the Soul do ill? So it keep innocence To err of its own will, Such is the virtue of that spirit Evil itself turns excellence If but Soul weave it, and Soul wear it.

Soul or no soul, as Olson sees it, man is nonetheless doomed:

I listen; I have heard Lately a sound of breaking-- I think, in the world's axle, Since all spins now so strangely. I have heard Certain shrieks in Europe no mortal man Can hear, and bear with calmness his mortality ; I have heard the bones of a Jew singing of Germany. . . . --But most I hear a sound like a watch ticking. You hear it not? --You pale in railway-stations, You haunted in offices, you waking, you a-dream--Yon hear it not? Go to, go to, you lie--The hand shifts, the weight falls, the wheels turn ticking; The enormous Clock of Doom winds up to strike.

The Cock of Heaven is craftily written, and its theme is major, but it fails to be more than backhanded poetry. It produces in its reader's conscience nothing more quickening than the kind of agitation that would follow his discovery that the skeleton in his closet was a corpse. Current events give such corpse-rousing a meretricious timeliness that contravenes the eternal tendency of skeletons to revert to useful dirt.

CANTOS LII-LXXI-- Ezra Pound--New Directions ($2.50).

In 20 new installments of his projected hundred Cantos, Poet Pound, who (after a brief visit to the U. S. last year) is now back in his expatriate's home in Rapallo, Italy, unveils two more facets of his Argus'-eye view of human history. In the 5,000 years' ups & downs of the Chinese empires, and in the bumps that John Quincy Adams took as minister for the young American republic, Watchdog Pound sees much to growl at, some things to make him wag his tail. These latest cantos make it clearer than ever that--for Pound at least--there is no mystery about history: financial skulduggery is the product of flesh-&-blood human punks; and the contemporary world is predominantly a product of financial skulduggery.

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