Poet of Life & Death

COLLECTED POEMS (175 pp.)--Kathleen Raine--Random House ($3.50).

At 48, England's Kathleen Raine has learned to like the unbuttered bread which is the traditional reward of a poet's poet. Daughter of an English schoolmaster, and a teacher herself from necessity, she could give useful lessons to all but a handful of poets now writing. Yet sales of her poetry, in the U.S. (if not in Britain), are slender, and it is not hard to see why. Few readers want to be so sharply reminded of the fact that life on earth is transient, and fewer still can distill comfort from the belief that birth is the beginning of death and death a return to the universal source of all life.

Kathleen Raine, as she points out in the introduction to her Collected Poems, has tossed overboard "love poems of a personal nature" as well as "poems descriptive of events in place and time . . . that seem now as dead as any other journalism." And she believes that poems written according to formal rules are "but an imitation of poetry." What, then, is left? A compact, pocket-sized jewel case of highly personal and rare poetic experiences that have less outward shine than inner glow. Poet Raine's father was a spare-time nonconformist preacher in suburban London, but there is no doubt that a Buddhist would understand better than a Christian the implications of The Sphere:

There is no end, no ending--steps of a

dance, petals of flowers Phrases of music, rays of the sun, the

hours Succeed each other, and the perfect

sphere Turns in our hearts the past and

future, near and far, Our single soul, atom, and universe.

Fellow-Poet Robert Graves can only worship before eternal woman, "The Goddess" of whom he often writes. But a visionary woman like Poet Raine, conscious of her mortality, can herself become the Goddess when she declaims:

And I who have been Virgin and

Aphrodite, The mourning Isis and the queen

of corn Wait for the last mummer, dread

Persephone To dance my dust at last into the tomb.

Read quickly, Kathleen Raine might easily be put down as a gifted pessimist. But no pessimist could write this Message from Home:

Now when nature's darkness seems

strange to you, And you walk, an alien, in the streets

of cities, Remember earth breathed you into her

with the air, with the sun's rays, Laid you in her waters asleep, to dream With the brown trout among the

milfoil roots, From substance of star and ocean

fashioned you,

At the same source conceived you As sun and foliage, fish and stream.

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