Verse Chronicle.

POETRY (Literary form); GOOD European, The (Book); BLACKMUR, R. P.; CLUMSINESS; BOOKS; POETS

The article focuses on a book "The Good European," by R.P. Blackmur, that is a collection of poems. These are poems of the most extreme situations possible, of a constricted, turned-in-upon-itself, contorted, almost tetanic agony: the poet not only works against the grain of things, but the grain is all knots. Blackmur's poems are troubling, difficult, and serious poems; one needs a good deal of time to get used to them. Readers are most Likely to be repelled by their stubborn awkwardness; their crudities, their some times barbarous word-twisting; their nightmarish unpleasantness and their echoes.