Books: Poet of Life & Death

COLLECTED POEMS (175 pp.)—Kathleen Raine—Random House ($3.50).

At 48, England's Kathleen Raine has learned to like the unbuttered bread which is the traditional reward of a poet's poet. Daughter of an English schoolmaster, and a teacher herself from necessity, she could give useful lessons to all but a handful of poets now writing. Yet sales of her poetry, in the U.S. (if not in Britain), are slender, and it is not hard to see why. Few readers want to be so sharply reminded of the fact that life on earth is transient, and...