Selected Poems of Janet Lewis

Formalist poet Lewis (1899-1998) might still be best-known as the wife of poet-critic Yvor Winters, or for her novella The Wife of Martin Guerre. Her subtly chiseled poems should have made her famous instead. Selected by Barth (First Morning, Last Night), who has also edited Winters, this welcome volume offers a new look at a careful poet with an unusually long career and life. Lewis began in the nineteen-teens, in a compressed and almost Imagist mode; her work of the '30s follows Winters's demanding classical precepts, often to better results than Winters's own poems. The early lyric ""Days"" reads, in its entirety: ""Swift and subtle/ The flying shuttle/ Crosses the web/ And fills the loom,/ Leaving for range/ Of choice or change/ No room, no room."" The sensibility that produced ""Days"" gave rise to more, and longer, good poems, among them ""Helen Grown Old,"" a hauntingly final stanzaic work that's at last turning up, as it should, in anthologies: what happened to Helen after the war? No one knows: ""No one brings/ A tale of quiet love. The fading sound/ Is blent of falling embers, weeping kings."" After three decades of poetic silence, Lewis produced substantial collections in the '70s and '80s; the late verse with which the volume closes remembers friends, houses and California landscapes with an attractive concision. Readers of Richard Wilbur, Louise Bogan or Robert Pinsky will likely want to go out of their way to track Lewis's work down--thanks to this edition, they may not have to. (Aug.)