POTATO FACE—Carl Sandburg—Harcourt. Brace ($1.50).
Poet Carl Sandburg’s fairy tales are neither as popular nor as winsome as English Author Alan Alexander Milne’s, but they have their own queer charm.
These are tales of the Potato Face Blind Man, who likes to spin yarns to little girls about moonlight, spiders, rats, elephants; of Yonder the Yinder, “a long spike of a boy with a burning bean for a head, and his eyes full of spears, spads and spitches;” about the man with long arms who held up the sky when it was falling but took his time about it. (Said he: “Hurry isn’t for me. Hurry is no worry of mine.”) The conversation is irrelevant and entertaining, the kind of children’s cross questions and crooked answers sometimes overheard by invisible adult ears:
“Where are you going?” “Tomorrow.” “Is that so?” “Yes, quite such, and acup of coffee, immediately if not sooner. . . .”
“Did you forget anything?” “Yes, mud, I am a hunk of mud and six pails of water. . . .”
“Why do you always shadow us?” “I am a peanut, a proud, peculiar peanut.”
Poet Carl Sandburg, onetime roustabout, hay pitcher, milkwagon driver, stove polisher, house painter, soldier (in the Spanish-American War in Porto Rico with the 6th Illinois Volunteers), newspaperman, is 52, married (he has three daughters), lives in Elmhurst, Ill. Long-haired, lanky-limbed, seamed of face, he likes to recite poetry, sing folk songs, while he accompanies himself on his guitar. Says he: “Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.” Other books: Chicago Poems, Corn Huskers,’ The Chicago Race Riots, Smoke and Steel, Slabs of the Sunburnt West, Rootabaga Stones, Rootabaga-Pigeons, Abraham Lincoln—The Prairie Years, The American Songbag.