Time's Sweet Praise

EXILES AND MARRIAGES (118 pp.)--Donald Hall--Viking ($3).

Now, as always, poets are a dime a dozen and good poetry is very hard to come by. The sad fact is that the best poets now alive are also among the oldest (T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings), and they are not adding significantly to their output. So when a young one comes along who has poet written all over him, the literary weather improves distinctly.

Poet Donald Hall, 27, has not yet unseated the great oldsters, but with his very first book, he has made a solid seat for himself. Exiles and Marriages has neither the poetic blaze of Dylan Thomas nor the suppressed smolder of Robert Frost, but it has its own true tone composed in almost equal parts of intelligence and imagination. Like most good poets, Hall knows that. Life is hell, but death is worse. And it is possible that even in an age of anxiety he puts on the hair shirt of guilt more often than is strictly necessary ("I wear--inside--the horizontal stripe"). But Poet Hall is very much alive, and alive to many things. He sings with grace in praise of his native New Hampshire, and he can celebrate his marriage and the birth of his son without seeming mawkish or losing a shred of dignity. A visit to Delphi is fastened into his experience with this finality :

No priestess spoke. I heard one sound.

The donkey's sure and nerveless plod Past ruined columns of a god Made dactyls on the ground.

And he can also show himself to be a thoughtful man and poet of his time:

I name an age of. choice and discontent Whose emblem is "the difficult to

choose."

Each man is free to act, but his intent Must circumscribe what he may not

refuse.

Each moment is political, and we Are clothed in nothing but mortality.

Harvard-and-Oxfordman Hall has won prizes for his poems both here and in England. He has deserved them. In Six Poets in Search of a Lawyer, Hall loftily disparages the sort of poet

Who writes his verse in order to amaze, To win the Pulitzer, or TIME'S sweet praise.

But the fact is that if he goes on writing, he is almost a cinch to win both.

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