WHEN ELEPHANTS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOMED

This sing-song collection of pretentious verse by the famous sci-fi author indicates once again, as if it needed proving, that most fiction writers have not the slightest aptitude for poetry. Bits of poorly assimilated Whitman and Dickinson pop up amid the general execrable aura of 19th century Romanticism ("Which glorious made the panoplies of thread./ What grandeur here!/ What pomp of Hannibal and Rome and Alps,/ Egyptian cerements and tombs, Troy's ruins, Delphic glooms-") which has all the sentimentality but none of the credibility of that period, not to mention archaicisms like "asifting," "naught," "Christ's handiwork." Personifications, rhetorical questions, pathetic fallacies gaily abound among the most unremitting series of iambic pentameters and tetrameters doubtless written in the past 50 years ("O, men by thousands, such as I/ would gladly 'neath your sweet grass lie") and rhymes of yesteryear ("To the lip of flower, to the edge of wonder;/ They do not tear asunder"). This is a truly awful collection of poems by an author whose name must have had power enough to twist some reluctant editor's arm; unless, of course, this is a camp joke to embarrass the poetry world. In either event, it might sell more copies than all this year's NBA nominees put together.