Collected Poems of James Laughlin

Laughlin, the distinguished publisher of New Directions, has spent a lifetime in literature. Following the advice of Ezra Pound, who suggested publishing as a career, he has seen into print such giants of modernism as Pound and William Carlos Williams. Along the way, he has written poetry, much of it touched by Pound's technique of mingling English verse with foreign languages, ancient and modern. Perhaps because of this, Laughlin's poetry did not grow far beyond a core of love poems marked by their conventionality and an assortment of verses written, so it seems, as daily sketches by an interested amateur. But successful work also emerges here: poems reminiscent of Cavafy (``I Saw Her First''); poems that presage the work of American surrealists like James Tate (``Busy Day''); work from Report On a Visit to Germany ; and the beautifully delicate long poem, ``In Another Country.'' The size and scope of the book should not obscure Laughlin's more recent work, which carries the stamp of a writer with a gift for the poetry of loss. His poems about old age (``For the First Time,'' ``Prisoner of Childhood,'' ``Out in the Pasture'') and the elegies for his son and wife move past a place Pound or anyone could have taken him. (Mar.)