Malice Muted

CATCALLS -- Peggy Bacon -- McBride ($2.50). For her collection of caricatures, Off with Their Heads! Peggy Bacon supplied brief prose texts that described her victims in mean, oblique phrases. Thus Franklin Roosevelt's head emerged as "a big trunk, battered by travel and covered with labels, mostly indecipherable." Cat-Calls is a collection of 36 poems in which the note of malice is a little muted, and in which an occasional tentative note of concern and passion is apparent between the lines. Most of Peggy Bacon's poems and pictures are impressions of city life, ranging from a glimpse of a laborer asleep in a subway to a literary party, from a professional invalid who needs "a wrap, a steak, a toddy and a kick!" to a celebrity who seems "so small beneath her crown!" A contrast between a farmer's "quilted hills" and a desolate city ruin suggests the type of life Peggy Bacon opposes to that which she satirizes. One surprisingly tender lyric, "Detached," indicates that she writes best when she is wholeheartedly sentimental or wholeheartedly mean.

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