2 JUNE 1917, Page 16

Poems. By Brian Brooke (Korongo). (John Lane. 3s. Gd. net.)—Those

racy, rattling verses describing wild adventures in the bush, with beasts of prey, or savages, or the more dangerous Ger- mans, show that British East Africa has already produced its counterpart of Adam Lindsay Gordon. The late Captain Brooke, who died of wounds on the Somme last year at the age of twenty- six, was a fine athlete and great hunter, as Miss Willcocks tells us in an introduction, and ho was able to describe vividly and naturally the fierce joys of the chase and the hardships of the pioneer. " That Ride," a race for the border between an illicit trader and a German whom he has taken unawares, is an exciting piece of direct narrative that may rival " How We Beat the Favourite "—its obvious source of inspiration. The Masai called Brooke " Korongo " or " The Big Man "; his friends called him " The Boy "—a more fitting epithet, for it is long since we read any verse that was so full of the glorious vigour and recklessness of youth.