Men of Our Time

Moramarco ( Modern American Poetry ) and Zolynas ( The New Physics ) have selected 247 poems written by men to demonstrate the effect of gender on interior life. The volume's organization--according to topics such as ``Boys Becoming Men'' and ``Sons Seeing Fathers''--is unfortunate. Even with tragic subjects, the loss of a child, for example (there are five such poems back to back), repetition wearies the reader and diminishes the power of individual works. Moreover, the writing is wildly uneven. A few of the poems are deservedly well-known, such as Richard Wilbur's ``Boy at the Window,'' first published in the early '50s. But most of the verse is flat, reflecting what the editors call the ``feeling self'' while exhibiting very little technical discipline. The editors' introduction links modernists Pound and Eliot to a tradition of ``conventional American maleness,'' a turning away from sentimentality. The selections here were made to oppose that canon. This is not an elitist collection; the authors represent all races and all ages of men. But scant attention is paid to the music of poetry and the deeper complications of imagination. (July)