It was T. S. Eliot who asserted, "The most individual parts of the poet's work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously." In other words, a healthy tradition is capable of modifying itself continuously in the guts of the living, giving rise to fresh statements and new implications.

This surely is true of the work of Marya Zaturenska, whose new book [The Hidden Waterfall] is firmly rooted in the many conventions of lyric poetry, but which startles with its freshness. In her choice of matter as well as of mode, Miss Zaturenska is a true lyric poet—that is, pertaining to the lyre and relating to madrigals, airs, and sonnets (i.e., "little songs"). It is appropriate that one poem in this, her eighth collection, concludes with the lines, "Renewed are the sea's advances./Resume, resume, the old dances,/And...