Word: starbuck
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Choice among the poetry selections are George Starbuck's Poems For a First Year in Boston (dedicated to Jonathan Edwards on the bicentenary of his death): "I. New Year: Arrival from San Francisco," "II. Olympus Having Weathered One More Winter in Boston," "III. Boston: Progress Report." The seven pages of verse are luxurious with alliterations, line and internal rhyme, and rhythmic variety, yet rarely seem splashy. Moreover, Starbuck has successfully used slang to aid rather than preclude intelligibility. The sense of the well sustained poem is a rare combination of sophistication and humanitarianism--a "Wasteland" reconsidered, as it were, featuring...
After the standard set by Starbuck, it would be difficult for poetry in any single edition of a magazine to look good. James Wright, in "The Thieves," has filled four stanzas with round and rolling sounds, which, appeaing as they sometimes are when taken one or two phrases at a time, present confusion together. However, two poems by Stephen Sandy come to rescue readers from the rain of apples in Wright's poem. Both are very tightly written, exotic pieces: "Moulay Ismail and King Louis' Daughter," and "Near Marrakech." The second of these is particularly ingenious and vivid...
...magazine is worth its price for Starbuck alone, but there's more. John W. Loofbourow interviews the Poets' Theatre personified in an enlightening dialogue marred only by a pedantic reference to Latin drama in the Elizabethan universities. Of 21 or so drawings by Joyce Reopel, Kaffe Fassett, Zero Mostel, Arthur Polonsky, Lynn Schroeder, Jane Nichols, John Wilson, and Renzo Grazzini, more kind words might be said, but that would require another review...
...water; to the roof of the deckhouse there clung five sick and starving men, Eric de Bisschop and his four-man crew. Ahead of them lay the foam-edged sickle of the reef of Rakahanga in the northern Cook Islands. They had already missed landfalls at the Tuamotus, at Starbuck and Penrhyn Islands. There was no option but to shoot the reef at Rakahanga in the hope of reaching the calm lagoon and the fresh water and food that lay beyond...
...third poem of this issue, "The Return of the Magi" by George Starbuck is neither ambitious nor very successful. It's about taking the Christ out of Christmas and the sing-songy rhythms and rhymes, while appropriate for the subject, walk the poem too hard in places. Elsewhere it stumbles over metrically awkward phrases or inconsistent imagery: "But when we got there the manger was bare./ The land was sore athirst." Consequently, the Magi seem to progress with the poem in a series of starts and stops. It is appropriate for them to stumble occasionally, but they never seem...