SMOKE ON THE MOUNTAIN

JOY DAVIDMAN, who began her career, appropriately enough, as nursery governess to a lion- cub, first came before the public as the poetess of Letter to a Comrade, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award for 1938. The volume showed, side by side with a delicate precision of imagery (one remembers the crabs "jointed, Japanese, and frail") an occasional orotundity, a deep bell-like note, not very typical of its period; in "The Empress Changes Lovers" and "Absolution" it successfully answered the question we must put to all young poets : "Can you go beyond the pageant of your bleeding heart and the general state of the world, and present a situation?"