Two Poets
The Motionless Dancer. By Peter Yates. (Chatto and Windus. is.) The Nine Bright Shiners. By Anne Ridler. (Faber and Faber. 6s.) MR. YATEeS first book showed considerable merit, and it is there- fore disappointing to find that the qualities shown there have put on little new growth. The intense use of internal rhymes and half rhymes shows a danger of hardening into a formula and the obscurity of the early work which was carried off by its intensity of ex- pression is here too often obscure to the point of boredom, and a hint of pretentiousness makes one wonder whether the room behind the locked door is really a treasure-chamber after all. Perhaps one is apt to be too critical of second volumes, and those who saw promise in the earlier work should read these new poems where some good writing is to be found among much that is not. Those familiar with Mrs. Ridler's verse in periodicals and anthologies will know her favourite themes: marriage, love and happiness in marriage, births, christenings, recollections of school- days. Her tone is conventional and assured ; she is neither chs- illusioned nor curious to be so, and her salves for the world's wounds are the orthodox salves of religion. She is, in contrast to most of her contemporaries, pleasantly free from dark despairs, though she suffers from the consciousness of venial sins, and the pervasive tone of happiness and contentment gives to her best writing a peaceful luminousness if also a certain complacency. Her poetry springs from immediate personal experience and contacts, and this sometimes results in poems which, however delightful to receive as letters, do not stand the test of print. A sensitive rather than an imaginative writer, she is at her best in descriptive writing as in the poem "Ringshall Summer ":
"Early, the air's thin silky blue Only the finest sun lets through, While through the wide-meshed air of evening Pours the light of his coarsest shining."
,r. describing a woodpecker: "There he hangs, his body pressed
To the trunk, like a sailor on a mast:
Only his brilliant head betrays him,
Lolling back from the trunk which hides him."
Here her use of the rhymed couplet is natural and lively, but there
is elsewhere an unevenness of style (as though the author were not
sure whether to speak as patrician or plebeian) which results in sudden and disintegrating bathos : "Taste shall equal scent ; rejoicing Really be now, not past or coming ; Having outdo desire, and longing Lead to delight ; all poetry Emerge as it was meant to be. And to be good will be easy."
or in the utterly banal : "With some unselfishness Extraordinary labour is expended In plans for a new world, when the bad times are ended."
SHEILA SHANNON.
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