WINDFALLS
By Sean O'Casey
Mr. O'Casey-'s new book (Macmillan, 7s. 6d.) is• made up of fifty pages of poems, four short stories, and a couple of one-act plays. The poems were for the most part written in his youth, and reveal—apart from the idealistic imagination which has persisted in all his best work, and which plays a lone hand as the saving grace of some of these early efforts — a conventional, and at times melodramatic, romanticism and no very great technical - ability. It is difficult to trace in their stereotyped patterns the origins of his later, and ex- tremely interesting, rhythmical experiments for the stage. The later verses anticipate (or reproduce—no dates are given) the verbal patterns of fl'ithin the Yates,' and are liable to the same _aesthetic objections, The- short stories are con- siderably more successful. They were, he tells us, " an effort to get rid of some of the bitterness that swept into me when the Abbey Theatre rejected The Saver Toss-le": the themes are bleak, the treatment realistic and vivid, and one at least of them—" The Star-Jazzer "—is a complete success. The two short plays are delightful in each- case the subject is farcical, and the finished product comedy of almost the highest order. In his depiction of Dublin slum and lower. class life Mr. O'Casey shows himself almost without a rival in whatever medium he chooses to employ.
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