Books: Bad Brothers

THE SEVEN SINS—Audrey Wurdemann —Harper ($2).

Last year one of the major surprises in the Pulitzer Prize announcements was the award of the poetry prize to Audrey Wurdemann, 24-year-old Seattle girl, for her second book. Bright Ambush. While most critics found Miss Wurdemann’s verse promising and fluent, it was also characterized as conventional, frail, filled with echoes of stock poetic attitudes and phrases. Last week Miss Wurdemann’s third book revealed an attempt to cope with a major theme, relating in varied verse forms the narrative of seven brothers whose lives represented, as they plunged toward their respective dooms, the seven Capital Sins. Beginning with a prolog describing the death of the father—”This giant man, this grey old beak, disastrous Granite of God that lay upon them always”—that released them into the world, the poem recounts Jared’s death from avarice, Abel’s from gluttony, Jasper’s from pride.

While the individual narratives are surprisingly detailed and localized, readers are likely to find Audrey Wurdemann’s symbols too conventional to remain long in the memory, her lines too diffuse to communicate vivid images:

This he knew,

Having lived among the cattle, but the girl

Was pleasant and strange, a litheness and a grace,

But solid and well-built, moving quietly

About the kitchen, reaching above her head,

Laughing back in his eyes.

More impressive than the platitudinous observations on human destiny, the permanence of art, or the exhaustion of physical love, are the occasional lyrics that break the narrative:

The drowsily drooping

Flowers fare

Easily, easily,

In this air.

The Author. Audrey Wurdemann’s first book of verse was published before she was 16, sponsored by the California poet, George Sterling. Born in Seattle, she graduated from the University of Washington in 1931, married Poet Joseph Auslander (The Winged Horse) in 1933, now lives in Manhattan. Tall, slender, black-haired, she is extremely shy, likes to cook and run her home, does not believe that poets must necessarily be temperamental or that they require a room of their own before their inspirations can flower.