The Pleasures of Poetry

Songs and Incantations. By W. J. Turner. (Dent. 2s. 6d.) Sir Hugh in Barbary. By E. B. W. Chappelow. (The Charming Press. 2s. 6d.) Work for the Winter. By Julian Bell. (Hogarth Press. 3s. 6d.) Poems of Strife. By Julius Lipton. (Lawrence and Wishart. Is. ) ALTHOUGli the title of Mr. Turner's latest book of verse raises

expectations of pleasant little roundelays interspersed with some potent runes suitable for recitation on Walpurgis night, let no one imagine that this is in fact what the book contains. Far from it. The opening section is entitled " Seven Sciagraphical Poems," and is in Mr. Turner's best sciagraphical

manner. Sciagraphy, in case you should not know it, is the art of delineating shadows; and Mr. Turner has mastered it so completely that in some of these poems it is very difficult

to know just where sciagraphy ends and poetry begins.

" Is it not strange that men can die

Before their bodies do, And women's souls fade from their eyes ?

'Tis strange, but it is so."

That verse alone, I feel, stamps its author as very nearly the most sciagraphical poet now writing. .

But silhouette is not Mr. Turner's only trick, and when it comes to a bit of substance he is equally bold and original. I particularly like the frank desire to share his wisdom with others revealed by such lines as :

" Innumerable forms do not make space, Pattern only is visible."

Or:

" Consciousness of the shapes of music is Silence."

It is only in those poems which deal with the fair sex that Mr. Turner leaves anything to be desired. It may

be capricious of me, but I find something a trifle unimaginative and cold about the name " Friday the Second of March of 1934," which he bestows upon an " unknown lady " on p. 46 ; and the same tendency to refer to his diary seems to

me to dull a little the rapture of Hymn to Her Unknown which opens :

" In despair at not being able to rival the creations of God I thought on her Whom I saw on the twenty-fourth of August nineteen thirty-four Having tea on the fifth story of Swan and Edgar's In Piccadilly Circus."

—though here the valuable geographical information supplied perhaps offsets any slight lack of poetic intensity. Not that Mr. Turner has any real prejudice' against names as such.

Give him a good Russian-sounding polysyllable and he will make a poem out of it before you can say Anna Pavlova.

" Let me express my love for Tourranova !

For Baronova and Riabouchinska!

Tamara Tournanova Irina Baronova Tatiana Riabouchiliska

In the flower of their youth, dancers of the Russian Ballet— Mr. Turner concludes his volume with a delightful Song Around the Year :

" With Christmas safely over The bees stir in their cover The lady takes her lover The glove goes to the glover With Christmas safely over."

And so on through Easter, VVhitsun, Mid-Summer, &c., till we get back to Christmas again. There is only one blemish : for some unaccountable reason the poet has omitted a verse on Advent. This is a serious flaw, and for what it is worth I offer Mr. Turner the following :

" With Advent safely over The flowers will soon be mauver The egg drops from the plover The maid turns to her hoover With Advent safely over.

Mr. E. B. W. Chappelow is not quite such good fun as Mr. Turner, but he too has a quality all his own. Sir Hugh in Barbary is a narrative poem recounting the life story of Sir Hugh of Montereau, who was unlucky enough to be Captured and sold to the Moors. He is held to ransom, but for reasons

which soon become obvious no one shows any inclination to bail him out. For Sir Hugh is, unfortunately, a bore.

Such an unwincing bore is he that on his last night on earth he can think of nothing better to say to the young

arab girl Fatma (whose ministrations have sweetened his

captivity) than this sort of thing :

" Fatma, I have dealt with ki igs, As a man should, face to face ; Stared not like a boor at rings Worth a manor or a brace . .

Let me tell a little rioiv, Ere my time be come to die . . ."

And tell her he does, through a round fifty pages, while the wretched Fatma is kept standing on tip-toe holding up a jar of—believe it or not—water, from which Sir Hugh takes a swig every ten or twelve pages. I cOnfess this struck me as a slight lack of courtesy in so chivalrous a Knight.

Neither Mr. Bell nor Mr. Lipton are humorists, either intentional or otherwise. Mr. Bell's verse is a cocktail. of the younger " contemporary " poets with a little how. mm plus Omar Khayyam by way of sweetener. It abounds in easy adjectival cliches—" The lost Battle, the long defeat," and has a distressing habit of descending suddenly into bathos. And there are too many expansive platitudes like : " Under the equal grey of the sky

Everything is slipping away '

Mr. Lipton is very easily the most serious writer of the four. He is passionately concerned about the exploitation of labour and the inhumanity of Machinery, and he commands respect

immediately by his obvious sincerity. But he no more than they is in any strict sense a poet. Or not yet. He may become one if he can succeed in fusing emotion and utterance into some - sort of imaginative whole. At present the form and the content

of his poems are totally disparate things,'and it is only occasion- ally, and as if by accident, that the one embraces-and reveals

the other. So that thoukh his ievolutionary songs may stir us with their vigour and his desceptioas of industrial oppres

sion impress us by their truth, they do not move us : they may convert us to Communism through expediency or shame but not, at any rate at present, through poetry.

I. M. PAnsoNs.