Dolphins: Poems

Is Spender (Collected Poems: 1928-1985) a major voice in poetry, or mainly a friend of various literary geniuses? The poet offers no conclusive evidence for either view in this collection of 19 poems. His subject is the past, personal and historical. The sense that the two provide a mutual context for each other permeates the poetry. Many recount early memories, such as ``A First War Childhood,'' a narration of a soldier carrying the child Spender into a bomb shelter during World War I. In this poem, as in some others, the sentiments seem naive or curiously out of date: ``I could hear his heart beat-/ With the blood of all England.'' As for the verse itself, it is lyrical in some places, yet burdened with trite rhyme schemes and boring iambic lines in others. One welcomes the structural departure in ``Black-and-White Photography,'' a free-verse experiment enriched with images. A second reading of the book allows one to glimpse an impressionable persona roaming through the ruins of the past in this poetry with an almost bizarre guiding intelligence. And in ``Poetes Maudits,'' Spender discards his romanticism and constructs a psychologically compelling profile of Rimbaud. Aside from occasional surges like this, though, Dolphins rides along on a rather unspectacular wave. (Sept.)