The Advocate

Until recently the Advocate read like the house organ for a literary club. The same names appeared again and again, and it became a polite joke to ask who had written for the new issue. No one would have minded this policy of nepotism had the quality of the craftsmanship been higher, but with two notable exceptions (Stephen Sandy and Arthur Freeman) the last three years have been meager ones. And so there may be cause for hope, since this long awaited April number includes a host of new writers and a surprising amount of fine work.

Daniel Eigerman leads the return to competence with the opening chapter of his unpublished novel, Heartboy. Eigerman writes smooth, rhythmic sentences; he had a flair for dialogue that builds his characters and has begun a tale that promises to be intriguing. Quite pleasantly, Heartboy does not smack of self-analysis; Eigerman has a story to tell and he tells it, without any unneeded verbiage or Angst.

Sidney Goldfarb, who has published before in the Crimson Review and Pharaetra, contributes three poems which I like very much. They show a good grasp of tone and an ability to restore impact to everyday phrases and imagery. Goldfarb avoids the purple passage, the overblown metaphor, and the "poetic" sentiment so common in the verse of young poets. instead, he turns out stanzas like these two from Mrs. Willy Cavanaugh, I Remember:

An in this house there is a man

Who loves me more

Than you

He loves me more than pink is pink

An more than blue

Is blue

Cause we play daisies in the sun

An sparrows in

The rain

An we play snowflakes in the clouds

An dew drops on

The pane

Another sophomore, Don Bloch, who reportedly "polishes his prose in Eliot House," has buffed his story Ooduina and the Dream to a high gloss indeed. If he had worked out the ending as sensitively as the rest, this delicate allegory of love would not wilt so incongruously.

Continuing this heartening trend of lean prose and effective dialogue, Anne Lindbergh focuses on incest in her short sketch about a brother and sister parting at an air terminal. September is a modest attempt that leaves one hoping for something more ambitious from Miss Lindbergh in the future.

From Roger Brown one begs more control. He reverberates with a noise that began a few years ago in San Francisco, full of images, full of lust, but so often formless and incantatory.

As for the others, they hardly merit close attention. Richard Sommer, a tutor in English, might be excused for his erratic rhyme schemes and his stammering metrics, if he had not labelled The Soldier a villanelle. There is, I submit, no point in pretending to a strict form if one violates it as flagrantly as Sommer does. If Sommer wants a proper category for this contorted piece, he might choose "virelay," defined as "a song or poem esp. with an intricate or monotonous rhyme scheme."

George Burns' On the First Day of Christmas is a Gothic shocker in modern dress, complete with Freudian visions and dexadrine. Suicide and castration are legitimate, if sensational, topics, but in this case their function is more emetic than literary.

As usual, the Pegasus and his cohorts have padded out their magazine with a plethora of poetasters, including the inevitable David Berman. But these unfortunate pages flip quickly, and a selective reading of the Advocate holds rewards for the present and promises of good things to come.