Collected Poems: Volume Four, 1974-77

Mary Ellen Miller was a poet and Associate Professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green.

This big book is full of old-fashioned poems on standard subjects: from death to flowers. It has some interest, but Souster’s sentimental approach in many of the poems is a definite limitation.

Several of the subjects are sociological in nature — there are lots of poems that express pity for beggars and bums. “Beggars in the Subway” ends lamely:

so it doesn’t look as if his life

like his pencils,

will have many takers today.

Souster sometimes ruins poems by connections that fail to have point. “That’s the Kind of Day Monday Is” is about the speaker’s eat attacking a sparrow, which the speaker then must put out of its misery. It ends:

There have to be better ways

to slide into Monday.

Presumably if the cat had killed the sparrow on a Tuesday this would not have been a poem subject.

There are lots of good, humane thoughts here, but most of the poems do not stay with the reader: there are too many ordinary thoughts expressed in the most unstriking fashion. Death poems like “Office Death” are almost uniformly sentimental.

The war poems, both the long ones and the short ones, are weak. “Old Soldiers” is a typical short one:

Old soldiers never die —

they live on to send their sons off

There are some good poems. “Two Crusts” is observant, somewhat more in the contemporary style. “My Harvest Quickens” is thoughtful, homey. “Counting” is one of the best poems in the book. It has a naturalness, an ease, a lack of pretension not characteristic of most of the poems.

Perhaps Souster doesn’t mind negative criticism. In “Thanks to Morris Wolfe,” he says:

It’s finally out — I’ve been overrated —

now I’ll be more loved and far less hated.