Buzzard of Is

No THANKS--e. e. cummings--Golden Eagle Press ($2).

Edward Estlin Cummings fulfills a U. S. tradition in being the cut-up son of a parson. The U. S. public (in so far as it has heard of him) takes him much less seriously than the unfortunate typesetters who have to follow his rocketing, pinwheeling copy. Whether Poet Cummings has started a tradition of his own is a question that only posterity will answer. To his own day he looks like a one-man poetic party. As leftwing, literarily, as they come, he is antipolitical; he pulls rude but only partly understandable faces at Communists, New Dealers and GOPartisans alike. Poet Cummings' typographical cavortings are so extreme that even his best critical friends have a hard time defending him from the natural suspicion of being nothing but a leg-puller; but readers of his war autobiography (The Enormous Room) know that he can write trenchantly and sometimes simply.

His poetry is another matter. His latest collection, dedicated to 14 Manhattan publishers (because they would not publish the book), is Cummings at his most untrammeled typical. Apoplectic or easily worried readers had best leave it alone; but bolder or more placid spirits will come to no harm, may even find some food for thought, amusement or admiration in No Thanks. Such an observable sunspot is Poem 21:

IN)

all those who got athlete's mouth jumping on&off bandwaggons

(MEMORIAM

or this pithy criticism of Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon:

what does little Ernest croon in his death at afternoon? (kow dow r 2 bid retoinis wus de woids uf lil Oinis Those who would like to see a good take-off on the white cult of the Negro will find one in Poem 43.*

In the midst of this dizzying flood faithful Noahs will observe at least one peak, and landing on it may find more solid ground:

Jehovah buried, Satan dead, do fearers worship Much and Quick;

badness not being felt as bad,

itself thinks goodness what is meek;

obey says toe, submit says tic,

Eternity's a Five Year Plan:

if Joy with Pain shall hang in hock

who dares to call himself a man? . . .

King Christ, this world is all aleak; and lifepreservers there are none: and waves which only He may walk Who dares to call Himself a man.

*Poem 44, for which Author Cummings does not seek wide circulation but which he wishes to ''exist for posterity." will appear only in the holograph edition (limited to nine copies at $99 each) wherein Mr. Cummings will write it in longhand.

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