The Old College Try

STRIKE THROUGH THE MASK! (70 pp.) --Peter Viereck--Scribner ($2.50).

To most people, says Poet Peter Viereck, modern poetry is a hopelessly obscure "snore and an allusion." Viereck (rhymes with lyric) is out to change that; he writes for the "intelligent general reader who has been scared away from poetry but who might return if addressed straightforwardly . . ."

More middlebrows than highbrows have applauded Viereck's efforts, but Terror and Decorum, his first book of more-or-less straightforward verse, won him a Pulitzer Prize last year. Strike Through the Mask!, his second, is as motley a product as Viereck's prizewinner, ranges from collegiate cacklings to fine and often funny flights of fancy. Conservative, not to say eclectic in form, it has more zest than grace.

The son of German propagandist George Sylvester Viereck,* Peter disowned his father's politics while still at Harvard, spent the war years as a sergeant with the Psychological Warfare Branch of the U.S. Army. Minus his flowing tie, 33-year-old Poet Peter becomes Peter Robert Edwin Viereck, Ph.D., a brilliant, right-of-center political theorist (Metapolitics; Conservatism Revisited) and associate professor of history at Mount Holyoke.

Of the 24 poems in Strike Through the

Mask!, at least a dozen strike out. But even when he fans, Viereck is refreshingly flamboyant; popping with energy and imagination, he gives every verse the old college try. Occasionally, as when he impersonates a pine tree singing its pitchy heart out to a pining rose, he can fall flat on his face. In the better works, wit gives weight to his wobbly lyricism. Viereck is at his typical best in a poem inspired by a newspaper headline: GLACIER ACCIDENT KILLS SKI PARTY; ONE BODY STILL MISSING. Impersonating the lost, icebound skier, he wrote:

Outside, my bodiless sisters frisk and

dive. I'd show them speed, could I but get

away,

Alas, alas, the snows that froze me dead Have sealed me in my own lugubrious

clay,

The only ghost on earth who isn't gay. When I consider all that waits ahead ( Years, years of boredom in my icy bed, No books to read and not one game to

play),

Sometimes I almost wish I were alive.

* Who drew a one-to-five-year sentence for failure to register all his activities as a German agent, was released for good behavior after serving 3 1/2years (TIME, July 7, 1947).

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