Shorter Notices
Living. in Time. By Kathleen Raine. (Editions Poetry. 6s.)
THESE poems show a delicate sensibility and good taste. None of them falls below a fairly high standard. Miss Raine has turned her back on the technical jargon of the 'thirties ; in Stone and Flower an individual voice was welcomed, and here again she writes simply as herself, not as a member of a group, though the influence of Hopkins, Eliot and Rilke is apparent. What as an individual she has to express, however, is nothing very robust. Her emotional gamut is love, sadness, piety, a worshipping ecstasy. She is tender. She likes roses (as Rilke did). But there is something tenuous and misty about her verse ; a lack of sharp image, of hard subject core. Her feelings always go the same way—inward, heavenward—and sometimes one feels she is writing without enough to say. She is at her best when, in the fashion of the day, she is using the Gospel story and the saints as subjects ; then she has something to write about. Her Four Poems of Mary Magdalene have a gentle beauty.
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