Poets' Book of Psalms.

If the new translation of the psalms by the International Commission on English (The Psalter, Liturgy Training Publications) errs on the side of brevity (see my review, November 17, 1995), the Poets' Book of Psalms errs on the side of logorrhea: most of the transcriptions are longer by half than the psalms in the King James Bible, on which they are based.

These psalms were composed, for the most part, by post-Reformation Protestant aristocrats, lay and clerical, who not only had plenty of time on their hands, but who followed the Protestant principle of private interpretation. Almost all are strictly metrical, overwhelmingly iambic pentameter, with a few other kinds of poetic feet and meters.

There are too few settings by well-known poets: Milton (five), Coleridge (one), Francis Bacon (three), Robert Burns (one). Sir Philip Sidney is there, and his sister, Mary Sidney Herbert, who between them account for thirty-nine of the psalms. Finally, where no suitable work could be found, the gaps are filled by fifteen very contemporary settings composed by Laurance Wieder, editor and compiler (from his complete psalter), and six by Philip Rosenberg, former editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society. These contemporary works are, in general, the most interesting in the book.

This is not to deprecate Wieder's labor of love. He has done us a favor by resurrecting the names and words of long-forgotten men like Miles Coverdale, the Puritan preacher who made the first English translation of the Bible; P. Hately Waddell, who made the first translation into Scottish (and whose psalms here are best taken wi' a wee dram of the gude Scotch); and Thomas Campion, unknown but to madrigal singers. Special attention should also be paid to Christopher Smart, with his extensive vocabulary and unusual rhymes (perdition, contrition; conjunction, compunction [Ps. 35]; essential, prudential; flagitious, pernicious [Ps. 49]; circumcision, derision; voracious, rapacious [Ps. 79]).

Thomas Carew's imaginative verses, "Good God, unlock thy magazines/of mercy and forgive my sins; Even from my birth I did begin/With mother's milk to suck in sin" (Ps. 35) are memorable, as are Henry Howard's: "Whose glutton cheeks sloth feeds so fat as scant their eyes be seen" (Ps. 73).

This collection of the psalms offers good layout, with plenty of white space on the pages; but to be honest, I would have settled for less white space and larger type.

Ralph Thibodeau is professor emeritus of music and humanities at Del Mar College, Corpus Christi, Texas.