The Faber Book of Movie Verse

Readers of this wonderful, if overly long, anthology dedicated to the power of cinema may be best served by skipping the editors' introduction--which spends too much time discussing the ``various'' and somewhat tenuous connections between verse and cinema--and moving right into the poems. French ( Malle on Malle ) and Wlaschin have compiled an excellent collection of poetry, ranging from e. e. cummings through 1950s work by Frank O'Hara to recent works by John Ashbery. The poems are a must for any cinema lover, and the editors provide copious notes on every poem, explicating film references. The collection is organized into topical sections: ``The Silent Cinema,'' ``Hollywood,'' ``The Stars and the Supporting Cast,'' ``Movies as Metaphor,'' etc. However, most of the poems seem to straddle genres, such as Charles Webb's ``After Not Winning the Yale Poetry Prize'' (featured in ``Movies as Metaphor'') in which the author imagines monsters from the horror genre, such as King Kong and Godzilla, descending upon a poetry judge. While impossible to read in one sitting, the volume is perfect for occasional reading; pick it up, and you'll find such delights as Amiri Baraka's ``Jim Brown on the Screen,'' Margaret Atwood's ``Werewolf Movies'' and John Hollander's ``MovieGoing''--whose final line serves as a summary of the joys of movies as well as of reading: ``These fade. All fade, Let us honor them with our own fading sight.'' (Apr.)