Just where the new land is, or when we entered it and by whom led, the authorities do not yet say, but everybody knows that in the 20th century there is a new colony in English poetry. More than a decade ago C. Day Lewis named as explorers Hopkins, Owen and Eliot, and among the pioneer settlers, Auden and Spender. And as controversial as its dates and heroes are the bearing and distance of the new poetry—whether it is removed from the mother country chiefly by its attitudes, its diction, its imagery, or by what.

The new idiom—the manner taken for the substance—has now reached even the lyrics in the family magazines. And the question that bothers many earnest occasional readers of modern poetry is whether any of the poetry in the new idiom has fully realized the resources of a rich new land, or whether the colonists are still clearing and fortifying a settlement of undisclosed value. From time to time those to whom this seems a preposterous question, but a difficult one to answer satisfactorily, are offered a book like P. K. Page's As Ten As Twenty that proves beyond doubt that the province of modern poetry is a powerful and secure one. The proof, it seems to me, lies in just this, that a poet of average talents can use the new idiom powerfully, communicatively, and as her own.

The force and clarity of Miss Page's writing are already known to readers of Poetry, where a number the lyrics in As Ten As Twenty first appeared. In aggregate they are if anything more impressive. Miss Page's poetry lies, to an unusual extent, in the matters of imagery and diction. Her ideas and attitudes are not new or bold, but the poems aim at making them deeply felt through presentation in quick, strange images:

At night his two-finger whistle brought her down
the waterfall stairs to his shy smile
which, like an eddy, turned her round and round
lazily and slowly …

and, occasionally, in striking diction: (from "The Stenographers")

Their climates are winter and summer—no wind
for the kites of their hearts—no wind for a flight;
a breeze at the most, to tumble them over
and leave them like rubbish—the boy-friends of the blood.

As significant as these successful figures and phrases are, it is in the more average, merely competent passages that Miss Page shows herself at home in the modern idiom. Instead of reverting naturally to 19th-century diction—as the modern poet did twenty-five years ago, say—she turns as naturally to the new. These poems are nowhere consciously modern, but where they become conventional (and all but the greatest poets have such moments), the conventions are modern. In "Round Trip," for example, we find the traveler departing with the latest equipment:

All is prepared for the incredible journey:
in the baggage car his trunks contain a sword,

binoculars and compass, powdered food,
shorts and a solar topee for the south,
letters of introduction and a mask.

But this equipment, for all that it is standard, belongs in the poem.

It would take more space and competence than are available here to define this modern idiom, although it is not hard to recognize. Miss Page's generation (she was born in 1916) is probably the first to find in this medium not a gesture of revolt, but its own natural poetic environment. And because her ideas are not revolutionary either, the effect of her poems is that of the coming of age of the idiom.

If I have made As Ten As Twenty carry a heavy burden of theory, that is intended as a compliment. Miss Page's talents are called average only in contradistinction to those of the major figures in modern poetry. At least one of the poems in this volume, "Stories of Snow," challenges that description. It is quoted in part, but this excerpt will give an indication of the effectiveness with which the poet has mastered her medium:

In countries where the leaves are large as hands
where flowers protrude their fleshy chins
and call their colours
an imaginary snow storm sometimes falls
among the lilies.

…..

And there the story shifts from head to head,
of how, in Holland, from their feather beds
hunters arise and part the flakes and go
forth to the frozen lakes in search of swans—
the snow light falling white along their guns,
their breath in plumes.
While tethered in the wind like sleeping gulls
ice boats wait the raising of their wings
to skim the electric ice at such a speed
they leap the jet strips of the naked water,
and how these flying, sailing hunters feel
air in their mouths as terrible as ether.
And on the story runs that even drinks
in that white landscape dare to be no colour;
how, flasked and water clear, the liquor slips
silver against the hunters' moving hips.

In the face of lines like these it would be impertinent to say anything about promise in this first book. Miss Page is, like modern poetry, way beyond showing promise.