Library Laughter

NINETEEN MILLION ELEPHANTS AND OTHER POEMS (115 pp.)--Helen Bevington--Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

"The art of versifying . . ." Voltaire once said, "is like dancing in fetters on a rope." For writers of light verse, the trick is to do the dance on a string. Most of them manage a light fantastic stanza or two, but soon fall flat on their anapests.

Helen Bevington often does no better. What makes her one of the pleasantest poetasters around, and Nineteen Million Elephants one of the year's happier books of light verse, is the wise, warm humor of an occasional poem. Some of them are bookish little pieces, with a humor as quiet and decorous as low laughter in a library. Example:

Poor Lamb. A stammer when he spoke Improved his gentle little joke, Which had a point--but one that went Best with an impediment.

But Poetess Bevington, a small-town girl (Hornell, N.Y.) who now teaches English literature at Duke University, is generally at her best when she shakes the dust of the library and gets back to herself -- as she does in Kissing Games:

When young, I never liked to play Dominoes, checkers, Lawn croquet,

Cribbage, parchesi, flinch, or lotto. But I liked to kiss Little Fred and Otto.

Only kissing games

Gave me a sense

Of skill and God's beneficence,

For I merely won at Rook or Pit.

Here I won Willie

When I was It.

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