THE CARPENTERED HEN

Over 50 turns for the verse of a nimble minded (and witted and footed) newcomer, from The New Yorker, display a bent for word usage, the exercise of ideas, spontaneity, and a pleasant type of ingenuity. There's a mirror poem, an alphabet, a series of snapshots; there are pieces touched off by statements in magazines or newspapers; there are serious numbers to balance off the more agile so that cleverness is not the sole effect of his work. For the market that has enjoyed the deftness and the everyman touches of McGinley, Fishback, or the originality of Nash, these will speak gaily.