Books: Poet's Story

BRIDGING THE YEARS—Cole Young Rice—Appleton-Century ($3).

At 14 Cale Young Rice won a roller-skating championship. At 16 he captained an undefeated baseball team. Says he: "I am sure these small triumphs served to strengthen the muscles of my will for the long climb to poetic goals. . . ." Poet Rice's story of his climb up Parnassus has as many alibis as there were slips on its slopes. Thus his attempts eo crash Broadway with verse dramas were steady failures because of "resentment against the frequently made assertion that I was 'America's foremost poet.' "

Now 66, Poet Rice lives in Louisville, a few minutes' walk from the Churchill Downs race track, travels far and often with Wife Alice Hegan Rice (Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch), especially likes ocean voyages, though at first he "little dreamed kindly critics would one day assign me a position among the 'preeminent' sea poets." Sample of his marine verse:

The small gray snail clings everywhere,

For the tide is out; and the seaweed dries

Its tangled tresses in the warm air,

That seems to ooze from the far blue skies,

Where not a white gull on white wing flies.