The Yale Series of Younger Poets issues the first book by Joy Davidman, "Letter to a Comrade."  Joy Davidman is pushing through to the essential treatment of values we all wish to read about; the clumsiness of many of these poems has more strength and promise in it than the slickness and ingenuity of many other books, and when the poems do come through, they arrive with the delicacy and fitness of "The Lately Dead," "Necrophile," "Snow in Madrid," [sic] "Prayer Against Indifference."  Conscious and writing hard, this poet expresses more direction than any other in this group [Rukeyser was reviewing works by five poets]; often the physical sense is clogged by language, bad language that makes wrong climactic lines like "dribbling through the fat hourglass" intrude on a spare, hard poem like "Waltzing Mouse," and gaffes like "If we could set our teeth in the hide of America/clasp her fat hills to our faces and be nourished by them" again and again in sticky images.  But if these faults can be fined out, a perceptive talent emerges.   The book, as first book, carried its own weight, and "Snow in Madrid" is bound to be reprinted often, with its biting ending:

 Men before perishing See with unwounded eye For once a gentle thing Fall from the sky