The publication of Richard Wilbur's New and Collected Poems (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $8.95) brings under one cover his six previous books, plus 27 new poems and translations. Reading through four decades of work, comprising almost 250 poems, invitingly arranged in reverse chronological order, ringingly emphasizes the justice of his reputation as the master of his craft. His poetry celebrates the power of metaphorical language to divine the human implications of natural patternment, and it affirms the capacity of strict metrics to contain both the dictates of civility and the promptings of joy.

While Wilbur has extended his range of topic, theme, and metrical form, and while he has gradually become more direct, he has never found it necessary to alter the fundamental cast of his poetry as did, for example, Robert Lowell or James Wright. He has remained steadfast in his commitment to formalism, or, more precisely, to the indissolubility of form and value. Wilbur, like his mentor, Frost, has always been an equilibrist, up on the tightrope performing feats of association in the process of his search for an equilibrium between apparently opposed objects of desire. Most often, that opposition is construed in the poems as a yearning for a formal perfection beyond the depredations of time and an equally strong impulse to harrow the pleasures of the physical world. Put another way, the major theme in Wilbur's work reflects the central tension in Western metaphysics, between the ideal and the real, between being and becoming. At times, by