Like the growing number among her contemporaries, Miss Davidman is a poet of strong social awareness, with a lively interest in the American scene.   She is city-born and bred, but she tries to see this country as a whole; the farms, the forests, the seaboards.  An intense spirit of nationalism, sometimes blindly patriotic, sometimes devotedly critical, has become a tradition in American poetry.  We have had poets who looked sourly upon the "cultural sterility" about them and fled to the ivory tower or to Europe.  We have had the romantic regionalists; and the oratorical chest-thumpers saluting America for her pioneer achievements.  And now we have a group of younger writers with a defensively dominant I-like-America theme song, vesting their hope in the possible social achievements of the future.

 Miss Davidman's title-poem is fairly representative of what the younger generation thinks.  She says, in brief, that America is a big and beautiful land of "breasted and milky earth" where most of the people are hungry; America, an abundant land where the corn goes to waste and the apples rot, is held together chiefly by the tourist trade "the women of the farmers spread empty beds with clean linen for strangers."  But, just as the young trees come back to land devastated by fires, there will be a resurrection from "the bones of destruction." . . . It may be said that Miss Davidman's figures and images drawn from city life are more convincing than her notations of rural scenes, which are apt to resemble representations in photographs and newsreels.

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It is unfortunate that Joy Davidman's work inevitably invites comparison with that of Muriel Rukeyser, another social poet whose first book appeared in the Yale Series of Younger Poets.  Unfortunate because, though "Letter to a Comrade" is a more competent volume in some respects than Miss Rukeyser's "Theory of Flight," the poems in it most influenced by, or most like those of the latter, are the least successful. . . . The longer works of both poets is marred by large chunks of emotional writing that groan and sweat under a burden of super-charged physical or sensual imagery.  There is a non-selective mal-fusion of figures and details that, like undergrowth vines in a swamp, choke each other before they ever reach the light.

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Miss Davidman's best work, individual in impact, is in her shorter poems--the direct, hard-hitting lyrics.  Memorable for their simplicity and clean inevitability are "Snow in Madrid" and "In Praise of Fascists."  But perhaps the most significant poem in the book . . . is the excellent "Prayer Against Indifference."  Here the poet's use of a compact, formal pattern compels discipline and economy of expression.  Further, it expresses most explicitly the spirit and outlook of the new generation--a generation that is above disillusion, scorns escape, places value in the courageous facing of reality, the strength to acknowledge and to fight a universal danger.