The Advocate

A cleverly-drawn gentleman relaxes and toys with a jack-in-the-box on the cover of the April Advocate. Perhaps his lethargy indicates the new season upon us, but more likely it is a result of having read the poetry in the issue he introduces.

The Advocate, however, leads strongly. In "The Education of Jem" by Peter Pitts, the author characterizes Jem, a somewhat brutish farmer, unable to tolerate the crying of his infant son. While Jem is caressing the child's head in a fatherly fashion, the baby begins to wail and what was gentle fondling becomes a severe enough rubbing to kill the infant. Pitts has the ability to convert the discontinuous ramblings of a man's thought into readable and convincing prose. His first paragraph on the hypnotic effect of a gate scraping back and forth along the ground and, later, the section on Jem's mounting irritation as the child's crying grows in intensity are particularly fine.

Also in a rural setting, but light in content is Robert Cowley's "How Reverend Goodman Brought the Good News." Written as a country youth's narrative, the story sketches a minister's efforts to bring a pair of town dissolutes to church. Cowley manages to weave a good many colloquialisms into the piece and to catch the naivete of his narrator's impressions, but frequently his sentences are stiff and uneven.

Stephen Banker's "Clara on Buses" shifts the locale from country to city and is the issue's longest offering. The story is a piece of analytic reminiscence about the courting days of a New York high school couple. Banker writes without subtlety: most of the gestures and remarks of his characters are interpreted in his prose. Much of the story is dull and some of it is riddled with cliches--"And again, for reasons unknown, the tone of their conversation has changed. They speak in low, intimate voices: something has created a bond between them."

The final story, "In the Cockpit" by Eric Wentworth, is a tale of the physical and emotional anguish encountered by a boy on a tuna fishing expedition. Wentworth has given his story a swift pace by emphasizing the boy's progressive exhaustion as he pulls a fish up from the sea. His passages on the boy's psychological reaction to his approaching failure often seem to break the continuity of the action unnecessarily and they add a pedestrian touch to the piece.

The Advocate also includes an essay on the experience of poetry. Written by Paul Matisse, "Poems, Poetry and Mallarme" was originally prepared for Professor MacLeish's Humanities 130. Poetry to Matisse is a completely personal thing which he parallels to the experience of love. He also discusses poetry as a key to one's consciousness. Though these concepts are not unusually profound, Matisse's expression is readable and interesting; and unlike many essays of this type it rarely gets tangled in metaphysics. In the latter part of the essay, the author discusses a Mallarme sonnet and this part perhaps could have been left to the more curious eyes of the Humanities grader.

To declaim the Advocate's poetry would slight Brock Brower's "Deucalion." A somewhat cynical, somewhat humorous affair on God's creation of man, Brower's easy meter and obscure, as well as obvious, metaphors give the poem a freshness unique in the issue. Frederick Seidel's "Not Too Damn Much Happens In the Spring" is a startling amalgam of Keats, Eliot, Cummings, . . . and apparently Seidel.

In the middle ground Derry Griscom's "Two Dimensions of the Sea" contains a good verbal and rhythmic description of the ocean in the first verse, but falters as the second verse slips into an apostrophe to a microcosmic dream. Keith Highet wrote "And In the Comment Did I Find Charm" within a somewhat limiting rhyme and meter scheme. The poem, like Peter Junger's "Two Kings" is innocuous, but pleasant. I trust that's all the writers intended.