Better than Biscuits

THE UNICORN AND OTHER POEMS (86 pp.)--Anne Morrow Lindbergh-- Panfheon ($2.75).

"And when I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased," wrote Anne Morrow Lindbergh lightly in her bestselling Gift from the Sea (TIME, Mar. 21, 1955). But writing poetry has been a serious concern of Mrs. Lindbergh's since her girlhood. "When I was young, I felt so small/And frightened, for the world was tall," ran one of her early verses. The poems of her 303 and 403, collected here for the first time, show that, as she grew out of those girlish fears, she also grew to be courageously at home in the world. Her courage is often colored with resignation, she is still looking for answers and praying for strength, but these poems are, on the whole, triumphant celebrations of life, love, death and, through them all, the "beauty of earth and air and sea."

Some of her poems bring an ache to the throat, remembered beauty to the eye, music to the ear, a fresh tack to familiar musings. Some do less. Mothers of five children are rarely the stuff of which great poets are made, as Mrs. Lindbergh herself has pointed out. Her prose is often markedly poetic; at times her poems are prosaic. But if artistry and eloquence occasionally flag, sensibility never does. At their best, her lines flash with beauty and brightness, and like

A sail, spark-white upon the space of sea, Can pin a whole horizon into place.

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