Strong Song

AMERICAN SONG--Paul Engle--Doubleday, Doran ($1.75). Paul Engle was awarded first prize by Poetry: A Magazine of Verse for the best poem about the Century of Progress Exposition at Chicago. Poems for an occasion are many--and mostly bad. But " America Remembers," included as tailpiece to this second volume of Engle verse, is the strongest and most maturely poetic achievement in the book, a swift, glamorous and compact running commentary on 300 years of American legend. Weaving back & forth, up & down over the vistas of local mythology, it strikes a genuinely inspirational note. The first poem, ''The Last Whiskey Cup, " strikes the same note. Excerpt:

We have shot the last Shaggy buffalo on the Western plains. Pre-empted the last free land--Now it is time (I have known it long in my heart} for this country To twist a lariat of us and throw it Over the ocean-to-ocean-flinging land And flip its loop across the lifted, crashing Defiant horns of the wild American spirit And with a twist around the saddle horn Drop it to earth, and on its sprawling hide Burn the clear new-world brand that unto men Shall be a witness of our heritage Wherever that great untamable beast shall toss The stars of heaven on its horns and graze Across the grassy ranges of the world.

A fresh note rather than a new one is struck in Poet Engle's writings. Enthusiasts may compare him to Whitman, to Sandburg, to Frost, but cooler heads will wait for more achievement before upping him above MacLeish or Jeffers. A note of challenge to defeat, however, augurs well for the future. "Complaint to Sad Poets" sounds the battle cry: Will you never be done with barking at the moon? . . . The terrier bitch that whelped its litter today Under the barn where the dirt is moist and dark Shames and defies you with the quiet logic Of life that works its ancient way out, knowing No fulness but to live, strongly to live. . . . Cry, sons of earth, blaspheming your parentage,

But know that when your futile lives are done

Death will despise you who have despised life.

The Author. Paul Engle was born and raised on his father's ranch in Iowa. He went to school at Cedar Rapids, worked lis way through Coe College selling news-Dapers. jerking soda. At the University of Iowa Stephen Vincent Benet gave him encouragement. As a Rhodes Scholar from Iowa he has completed his first year at Oxford (Merton College). Engle likes swimming and horses and is now "writing very hard on a horse novel." A first volume of verse, The Warm Earth, was published in 1933 by the Yale University press in its Younger Poets series.

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