Collected Wit

NOT SO DEEP AS A WELL--Dorothy Parker--Viking ($2.50).

Light verse usually shows at its best in the perishable pages of popular magazines, seems a little pretentious in a formal volume of collected works. The collected poems of Dorothy Parker, although they hold up better than most, are no exception. Epigrams that seemed sprightly when they first appeared and were quoted by a thousand after-dinner speakers tend to look lonely and sallow printed as poetry on a wide-margined page. Not So Deep As a Well includes all of Dorothy Parker's poems except a few that she did not wish reprinted, reveals her expert craftsmanship, the narrow range of her humor, her keen eye for fleecy feminine affectations. It also reveals that her major contribution to U. S. humor has not been such jingles as her celebrated observation that "men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses," but her relentless parodying of those mournful laments on lost love that are the stock-in-trade of most U. S. poetesses:

Love has had his way with me.

This my heart is torn and maimed

Since he took his play with me.

Cruel well the bow-boy aimed. . . .

Sweet, why do you plead me, then,

Who have bled so sore of that?

Could I bear it once again? . . .

Drop a hat, dear, drop a hat!

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