Puck Fair

THE ORGY by Muriel Rukeyser. 213 pages. Coward-McCann. $4.50.

The Puck Fair at Killorglin in West Kerry is an unholy midsummer Sabbath. Its origins are pre-Christian. The Puck is a wild male goat, the grandest that can be caught. For three days he rules. Priests and police crouch indoors. Strange road folk called tinkers swarm from caravans. Horse and cattle traders bargain early and drink late. Maidens and married ladies, undanced with for the rest of the year, play ten-toes-up with bumpkins made bold by Puck's fine pungence.

The narrator, a holidaying poet and biographer who is indistinguishable from Author Muriel Rukeyser herself, is supposed to be scouting for a friend who makes movies, but abandons the notion after tucking back her first glass of Irish whisky. This, as she reports it, is a two-paragraph drink, full of a poet's notion of prose, beginning "The Irish touched my lips, cool, and then branched out in purity of fire, lips, breath, breasts . . ." and ending "all other whisky is the shadow of Power's."

The author's reporting of the color and confusion of this Celtic barcarolle is vivid and poetically evocative, but it is interrupted by personal references that seem self-indulgent. Her sister is flying to Peking, the author mentions several times without explanation. There is a playwright named Jonah, a son, a marriage, all mentioned with verbal nudges and eyebrow lifting, none comprehensible to the reader or relevant to Killorglin. There are friends in Ireland whose portraits are washed in far too thinly for a book that at times appears to be a memoir in the act of becoming a novel. The last impression the book leaves is of a richly emotional letter from someone the reader does not know to someone else he has never met.

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