Abse ( White Coat, Purple Coat ), a British physician, writes thoughtfully about medicine, ethics and the art of poetry. Much of the work is inspired by themes from his Jewish heritage that are generally handled with irony and dark playfulness. The book's title is a reference to a longish poem about the speaker's childhood, describing how he escaped his piano lesson to join other boys in the park and the teacher was then ``dismissed.'' This small crime stands out against the background of Hitler's Europe: ``Later, only the landing light / under the bedroom door: / no hectoring voices, / no blameless man-sized scarecrow / being thumped down the carpeted stairs / with sovereign impunity / before Sleep's grisly fictions / and forgeries of the world.'' The stately tone, the clipped voice, the penchant for pun and paradox are typical of Abse's poetic style. This is not ground-breaking technique but it is articulate and carefully shaped. For the most part, the poet avoids sentimentality through a kind of professorial humor: ``True ancestors of mine, / those in hell, those in heaven, / they're not big wheels like roaring, war-loving Antara. . . .'' Occasionally the poet's persona seems contrived, as in a poem in which he describes himself playing the femurs of an infant ``like castanets'' when he feels the incapacity to express compassion. (Apr.)
Abse has been publishing since 1948, but here he produces a short volume more reminiscent of a young poet searching for his voice. In his finest poems, which depict the physician drawing upon his daily life for inspiration, it almost seems as if William Carlos Williams had a British descendant. At his weakest, however, Abse is literary and limited by form. He resorts at times to selecting words at random and even finding that there are ``so many words in the dictionary/ I have never used.'' He easily gets caught up in his own humor, as when he imagines himself making love to the wife of Columbus. Yet another voice is that of the Jew, the eternal sufferer making his pain visible to readers, the man who can write ``Dear love, Auschwitz made me/more of a Jew than ever Moses did.'' A muddled volume recommended for larger collections only.-- Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, ``Soho Weekly News,'' New York
