Robert P. Tristram Coffin is a fecund poet. His latest book, Strange Holiness, is in contrast to his latest one before that, Ballads of Square-Toed Americans, in that this is subjective as that was objective. I am only afraid that Mr. Coffin may have a fatal facility. He shapes and turns his poems well, and he usually has something not only interesting to write about but also seen and felt. Also, his phrase is often extremely good. Moreover, the devotional element in these poems has nothing mawkish about it. One feels that the poet pleasured himself in writing all of them. And yet one also feels that he might have conserved the energy expended in writing a good many of them and poured it all into one poem that would have greatly surpassed them all. Where a man has proved his powers, as Mr. Coffin has already done, I think it is allowable to expect him to surpass himself. This book does not surpass others by the same writer. Were it a first book it would not make nearly the impression upon the reader that certain other books of his have made. That he is a good workman is beyond question. But he is also, at rare intervals, a good deal more than that. In this particular volume those intervals are rare indeed.