Rukeyser 2

U. S. 1-- Muriel Rukeyser -- Covici, Friede ($2).

One of those who take the contemporary U. S. hard is young Manhattan Poet Muriel Rukeyser. Living in the nation's richest city, she is pinched by a sense of waste: a waste of spirit matching a material waste. To remedy the latter she counts on radical reform, if not revolution; to remedy the former she counts on mental and emotional continence. To help remedy both at once she writes poems that are at once radical and continent.

Less than continent are the christenings that Poet Rukeyser gives her books. Theory of Flight, her first, carried too many pinfeathers to rate its machine-finished title. U. S. 1* the title of her second book, is an ambitious, almost a cocksure misnomer. The book's titular material is actually a series of poems called The Book of the Dead. This series "will eventually be," Poet Rukeyser states, without batting a weather eye, "one part of a planned work, U. S. 1. This is to be a summary poem of the life of the Atlantic coast of this country. . . ."

Despite her humorless yen to dress her poems in proud, premature long pants, Poet Rukeyser succeeds, in The Book of the Dead, in giving a clear flash of what makes the contemporary U. S. hard for everybody to take: At Gauley Bridge, W. Va., a hill being tunneled on a hydro-electric project turned out to be 90--even 99% pure silica, of great metallurgical value. Consequences: the silica, for greater speed, profit, was mined dry; the tunnel workers developed silicosis, died like ants in a flour bin; lawyers representing the workers charged their clients some 50% of the piddling compensations collected; a committee took the matter up before Congress. Net result: Bill blocked, investigation blocked; the workers left their flour bin, some continuing to die like ants, some beginning to think like Poet Rukeyser.

Part journalism, part lyricism, part Marxian mysticism, the 20 poems composing The Book of the Dead are so many strong shakes given to its readers' complacencies. That Poet Rukeyser has shaken her own complacencies first is shown in her book's 20-odd other poems, notably The Drowning Young Man, probably the best poem on a suicide yet written in America. Taken all together, the poems are an exciting and, on the whole, trustworthy appeal to all the belligerents who [and only who, if you ask Poet Rukeyser] know the world. Only these, she implies, can be in on the secret of what really happened yesterday at Gauley Bridge, is happening today in Spain:

Once the fanatic image shown,

enemy to enemy,

past and historic peace wear thin;

we see Europe break like stone,

hypocrite sovereignties go down

before this war the age must win.

*Not to be confused with U. S. One, a guide to the famed Maine-to-Florida motor route, published last month by the WPA Federal Writers' Project.

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