Sorrow is the Only Faithful One: The Life of Owen Dodson.

By James V. Hatch. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993; pp. xvii + 362. $34.95 cloth.

In the 1970s two perceptive reviewers noted that "the literary world seem[s] to rediscover Dodson once every decade" and that "it is an appropriate time to expose the American public to one of its most distinctive, though too little heard, poetic voices" (272). With the publication of Hatch's biography of Dodson, influential poet, playwright, director and educator, both rediscovery and exposure can now take place in the 1990s. The title, Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One, taken from Dodson's own haunting verse, captures an undeniable characteristic of the man, sets the tone of the book and becomes a fitting epigraph for a biography of an artist who was obsessed with death, but who refused to make a formal decision about dying. While Hatch, who knew Dodson only in his …