[Ghiselin is an American educator, poet, essayist, and critic. Below, he reviews Five Poems—a collection of poems that were first published in Poetry in September, 1947—commenting on theme and execution.]

The central concern of all the poems of this group [Five Poems] by Miss Avison is the order by which men live. Very markedly this is a poetry of ideas. Explicit argument and exposition are prominent in much of it, particularly in passages dealing with the use of certain constructs of our vision and with the means by which new ones are created.

In two of the poems, "Perspective" and "Geometaphysics," Miss Avison examines some current constructs. In the former, she rejects the illusion of perspective because it "cripples space" by defining it in a "small tapering design / That brings up punkt." She prefers her own imaginative vision of the distant in all its forceful reality, its mass and its fullness of detail. This vision, it is implied, is Mantegna's, lost since his time, recurrent as a sport (in the double sense of mutation and diversion) in the poet. Mantegna sought to create the illusion of perspective, and he succeeded remarkably. But he kept the intensity of the far, depicting it in such vigorous detail that it retains something of the importance, the immediacy, of the near. Thus Mantegna may be said to have qualified his acceptance of perspective, and presumably it is this qualification that the poet has had in mind. In her perception, the "fierce / Raw boulder five miles off" and the "great spear of grass on the horizon" lose nothing through distance. "Does a train / Run pigeon-toed?" she asks, and she describes a railway journey in which passenger and train of undiminished size appear to swell tremendous against the shrunken images of them forced on the mind by the distortion of perspective. Concluding her poem, she concedes that her way of vision is doomed by an infection of fear which imposes a false vision on conforming minds. Our sense of anticipated loss protests that cancellation.

"Geometaphysics" likewise displays the evils created by inadequate constructs of vision and suggests a cure. In saying that "The earth was once a circle-stage" Miss Avison implies that the lives of those who accepted that early view attained something of the order, unity, and completeness of a drama. Those who accept the current spatial image she represents as confused and distracted by a construct that turns attention toward the inane, where they grope "grotesquely." The final stanza defines the means of salvation: neither the manifestly impossible return to an old view nor continuing exploration of space, but discovery of a new orientation, in a plunge into "outer utter darkness," the antithesis of that known image which must be rejected if it is to be transcended.

The focus of interest in both these poems is the argument. Imagery and other concrete substance are determined by the need for such specification as will bring to life the matter of discussion. Whether right or wrong in judgment, the poet is serving our need to question the constructs we live by and to examine their serviceability in releasing our energy and in ordering our experience. Yet of course the value of the poems does not subsist primarily in the appraisal but in the whole activity of controlled insight stimulated by the poem. Ideas in poetry are sustained, if sustained at all, less by cogency of argument than by the vitalizing connections which they are given in the wholeness of such activity. Such connections are notably richer in "Perspective" than in "Geometaphysics," which is somewhat too general, deficient in specification.

The same defect slightly weakens "The Party," which depicts the enemies of change exactly without profoundly revealing them. The phrase "standing guests" defines them: they are static, guests rather than hosts, not owners and creators of the world in which they hold their places with assurance. Into that room, little enclosure of our ordinary life, comes "No alien unthought breath," no unformulated influence to "corrupt" the formulated with liberating change.

Miss Avison writes with more power of those who did not come to the party. The most successful passage in these poems is to my mind the third stanza of "The Iconoclasts," in which she surmises that to Lampman (the Canadian poet who understood his inner life so precisely in terms of landscape) the bleak north was like a room with inscrutable limits, as large as April, like the open world which burst upon primitive men when they rejected the cave. The force of meaning is greatest in the exactly disposed phrase "his April cave" which sums up the meaning of the landscape for Lampman and introduces the comparison of his "madness" to that of the cave men. Here "cave," the ironically inescapable limitation of order, is freshened and enlarged by the qualities of its epithet "April." In depicting the initiators of life in the hour of inceptive violence when the impulse toward new order drives them furthest into disorder, Miss Avison has developed the most powerful possible instance of the passion for order. For the act that requires most of the creator is renunciation of the order of the past while the new is still unseen: then everything certain is risked, to the end that everything desired may be expected.

Least explicit of these poems is the "Song But Oblique to '47." It may be thought to exemplify the difficulty which so much modern work offers to the reader, yet in its realization of the theme of betrayal it is clear enough. The speaker in the place of safety and feasting addresses the "fox," excluded because the speaker has neglected to call him into the house. The fox skulks shivering, beset by hounds, "slavering dark," and "salt and wintry wind," which are made virtually one by means of the epithets "slavering" and "salt," and are in the final stanza identified with the heart of the speaker.

Read by itself, the poem means at least this betrayal. Read with others in the group, it gains meaning. The house from which the fox is shut out must be, as in other poems, the ordered construct, cave and drawing room. Since the betrayer is at home in the house and controls it, and at the same time has the secret of disorder, for in the midst of his lighted shelter his heart is a "salt and wintry wind," he is presumably a creator, perhaps the poet. The betrayed is dependent: he cannot create his shelter. In terms of this relationship, the poem dramatizes the dependence of the uncreative upon the creators.

But one's realization of that dependence comes first as a sense of the power of the betrayer and the terror of the excluded. And at that stage of realization, a stage prolonged by the difficulty of interpretation, the first effect of the poem is to communicate the life-sensation of the lost, all those who do not know the proper limits of their being. For many, this must constitute self-knowledge. For nearly all, it must be the savor of pursuing fear. It remains the deepest sense of the poem. Though it is the antithesis of the basic excitement of "The Iconoclasts," it is a familiar component of that excitement. For whoever finds a new way of life must learn what it is to be lost in chaos. These are valuable poems, not primarily because of what they say on the whole so interestingly about their important subject, the architecture of vision, but because of the fullness and intimacy with which they bring us experience of it.