Porgy

PORGY--DuBose Heyward--Doran ($2.00). Straightforward story-telling in a poet's prose is always rich reading. Poet Heyward's province is South Carolina--Negro life along the waterfront of old Charleston, with the atavistic rhythms, religion and animalism firmly rendered, the dialect perfect, the antics convulsing. Porgy, a purple-black beggar with crippled legs and a pungent goat, croons to his scampering dice, prays with his neighbors in Catfish Row, contemplates the insignificance of man. In a shadowy triangle involving Crown, a cinnamon stevedore with a chest like a cotton-bale, and his big wench Bess, Porgy's soul undergoes the extremes of compassion and ruthless violence, much as the city now basks sleepily in hot sun, now is hammered with a furious hurricane, now basks again.