Though the originality and durability of Beckett's novels and plays assure his reputation as a major writer of our time, his work as poet has attracted far less sympathetic attention. All the while expanding that "gallery of moribunds" he has made so authentically his own, Beckett has been writing poems on the sly…. Distilled from the hardy irregularities of Joycean rhetoric, Beckett's voice in verse has the same haunting cadence, the same "dour questing," the same "dread nay" we recognize from his drama and prose. Like some "death-mask of unrivalled beauty," Beckett's poetry offers us a very unexpected detour into the formalities of lyrical structure.

Beckett's lyricism will come as no surprise to audiences accustomed to his skillful transformation of the prosaic into the poetic. Even in Waiting for Godot, where two tramps mark time in an almost empty eternity where all certainty is provisional, the playwright presents us with a drama of indirect action reminiscent of Chekhov's stage lyricism….

Beckett's voice can be most vigorously poetic when he is not writing specifically in poetry. Some of his most lyrical statements take place when we are least likely to expect them. Crawling in the mud, buried up to the waist in a mound of earth, listening all alone to a tape recorder roll on to silence, or making "immaculate" love in a garbage dump, Beckett's dramatic and fictional characters forever impress us through the poetic vitality that shines through their despair. The lyricism catches us off-guard, for the landscape leads us to expect nothingness but delivers romanticism instead. Hope springs eternal: there is splendor, suddenly, in the trash.

Ironically, Beckett can be far less lyrical in his poems. In "Whoroscope," his first professionally published piece, Descartes is a finicky eater who likes his omelette made of eggs hatched from eight to 10 days before. "Shorter or longer under the hen and the result," a note assures us, "is disgusting." Even lowly albumen cannot escape the philosopher's wrath: "What's that?/A little green fry or a mush-roomy one?/Two lashed ovaries with prostisciutto?" Heavily allusive, the poem's circumlocution and discontinuous form are strictly "Ex Cathedra": Pound's advanced techniques ("very dissociated and recombined") take it on the chin within the confines of Beckett's Cartesian railing….

Not all of the poems in English and French incarnate in this same youthful exuberance. In this respect "Whoroscope" is unique, for the poems which follow in this collection trace far more somber tones. Sometimes based on Provençal forms, the 13 poems originally published as Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates reflect the uneasy consciousness of the writer's developing sensibility. An index of the poet's own wandering, the scene shifts from place to place, now Dublin, now Paris, now London, but the plaintive voice is always the same. (p. 33)

The poetry of the '70s bears an inflection characteristic of Beckett's current preoccupation with minimalism in drama and prose. The "hellice eyes" of "dread nay" are apparitions which materialize everywhere in the enigmatic residua, those short prose-poems of recent vintage Ruby Cohn describes as "lyrics of fiction." As in Ping and Imagination Dead Imagine, "the subject falls far from the verb and the object lands somewhere in the void." We have heard this "far cry" before, but the actual manifestation in verse serves to remind us once again how close Beckett's later work in prose comes to poetry. There are correlations with dramatic values too. The "something there" in the poem of the same name ("not life/necessarily") might accurately delineate the "semblance" so fearful in Footfalls, while the "steps sole sound/long sole sound" of "Roundelay" defines the refrain of May's obsessive pacing in the play. Despite the minuscule dimensions of this recent work, the "stiff interconnectiveness" of Beckett's world remains as strong as ever.

The translations from Eluard …, Rimbaud … and Apollinaire … are remarkable examples of Beckett's skill in rendering the sound and sense of one language into another. Here is the same discipline in adaptation Beckett has effected in his own English to French/French to English material. Of very special interest in this volume are the eight maxims translated "long after" Sebastien Chamfort, where Beckett makes an unusual departure from the text to render a neo-classicism all his own: "Better on your arse than on your feet,/Flat on your back than either, dead than the lot."

If Beckett offers us no major breakthrough in modern poetry, it is largely because he directs his talents as "homo logos" to the other genre he has consistently reshaped to meet his own literary needs. In love with the aside, the tangential comment, the footnote and the mathematical calculation ("Not count? One of the few pleasures left?") Beckett has fashioned a vehicle for himself in drama and prose which allows him to be romantic and irreverent at one and the same instant. Yet the simultaneity of voices speaks with conscientious regularity throughout his verse in a "mixed choir" of laughter and tears. Even though the important poetry is to be found in his prose and the essential lyricism in his drama, the collected poems in French and English present us with nothing less than the minor work of an acknowledged modern master. Here is the "mixed declension," "a permanent abode" in verse for Beckett's continuing fascination with "the blue celeste of poesy." (pp. 34-5)