Catbird's Song

As the author warns in the preface, ""this is not a collection of essays but a mixture or jumble of efforts in other modes: the symposium statement, the anecdotal letter, the review, the short speech of welcome, the explication, and so on."" Hardly a thrilling prospectus, but Wilbur is one of the best poet-translators of the last 50 years, possibly the best technician of traditional meters. For readers of poetry, everything he says will have some interest--and, for better or worse, he knows it. Otherwise he would not have included his reflections on dreams (his own!) and on movies, or so many unrevealing memoirs of his friends Frost, Thomas, Bishop, Plath et al. Take them without their flashes of inspiration or their scandals and you're left with great company, no doubt, but also with demanding subjects for published reminiscence, and Wilbur's discreet, affectionate anecdotes don't always come up to the mark. The ""explications"" (e.g., of William Cullen Bryant, Poe, Witter Bynner) are better, though Wilbur tends to over-explicate, especially when it comes to his own poems. The most striking parts of the collection tend to come in brief digressions, unbelabored flashes of brilliance on, say, Longfellow's beard, Tennyson's meter or E.A. Robinson's narrators. But even at his least scintillating, Wilbur is always right, and (as his readers have always known) he writes unerring prose even when his muse is out of town. (Apr.)