Here is what an intelligent, sensitive, and vivid mind thinks about itself and the things of the modern world.  It will be obvious enough, to anyone who reads Letter to a Comrade, that the heroes of the Twenties are not Miss Davidman's heroes nor their demons her demons.  What may not be so obvious is the fact--important to any young writer--that she has a very considerable command of technique and an individuality that can express itself successfully in a variety of forms.  There are echoes here, as there are in almost any first book, and there are a few practice pieces.  They occur, as they are bound to occur, because the poet learns his craft by exercising it.  But there is also genuine power--and that's rather harder to come by.

. . . .

Miss Davidman can see, with accuracy and freshness, the thing in front of her eyes,

the desert towns, the blown trees edging the prairie meant to break the wind, and the abandoned filling stations and the places where jack rabbits jump out of the night,

the wet, fine street that "shines like a salmon's back," the fertile country,

Divided between the buckwheat and the wheat milky with breathing cattle. . . .

 She can also comment upon the thing seen with fire and imagination.  And, in such poems as "Spartacus 1938" she can write with an emotion none the less powerful for being contained.

 I have chosen above from her work in the freer forms.  But she can be equally sharp and telling in the older ones, as in "Submarine," "Snow in Madrid," and the effective and moving "Prayer against Indifference" . . .

 . . .

 If I have stressed Miss Davidman's social and contemporary poems, it is not because they are the only poems in the book.  But a good many social and contemporary poems succeed in being merely social and contemporary.  They have admirable intentions but no execution.  But Miss Davidman is able to say things so they stick in the mind.  And in "Twentieth-Century Americanism"--to mention a single poem--she has done a very interesting thing.  She has given the point of view of the city-bred toward America--the America that does not come from the grass-roots but from the long blocks of apartments under the electric light.  And she does it so you will remember it, though, as you will notice, she does not do it with entire approval.