Poetry

THE MAN COMING TOWARDS You--Oscar Williams--Oxford ($2).

One day in 1936 a smart, middleaged, successful advertising-man, who had turned his hand to conducting publicity campaigns for Florida politicos, set out to drive the 212-mile stretch between Jacksonville and Tampa. He reached Tampa alive but different: on the way he had had a dazzling vision of life as it could be, had said good-by to the beliefs which until then had stimulated his business career. Thinking he might have gone crazy, he consulted doctors, acquaintances, himself. But nothing relieved his perplexity until one day he wrote some verses about the English coronation--which he immediately sent to every paper in the U. S. and the British Empire.* From that day since, Oscar Williams has been no advertising-man but a professional poet, who has received Poetry Society prizes and has been published in several highly pick-&-choosy magazines.

Poet Williams' new book, The Man Coming Towards You, is full of the perfervor of one who, recently converted from spiritual apathy, is trying to sell the contemporary world a rousing look at its flabbergasting self.

On my blood-and-bone balcony poised perilously

Over the morning canyons of the present tense

I arise to view the times I have awakened in:

Europe spreads helpless hands called newspapers . . .

At its best, his work publicizes a staple poetical axiom--that Man is a self-contained spirit, inhabiting a material world. To give the old axiom zip, Williams dresses it up in the vivid picture-writing that admen use to give staple products up-to-the-minute attractiveness.

Man, frightening animal, snarls in the chains of gravitation,

With godhead, a quicksilver skeleton, in his body . . .

The Man Coming Towards You stands out like a billboard among current books of verse. It has its author's excitement to proclaim, and it proclaims it in images that crash all the gates of its reader's senses. As an eye-catcher, it rates 100; as an eye-opener, perhaps five.

*One paper, in South Africa, printed them.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.