BOOKS.
THIS - WEEK'S BOOKS.
Mn. ROY CAMPBELL'S verse is rowdy and alarming : The Flaming Terrapin (Cape) stands like a giant among the bagatelles and delicacies of most modern poets. And, like a giant, it is primitive and unsophisticated. He is definitely coarse in technique and his elatter and hiss of rhythm will stun the armchair reader :—
" The flying fishes in their ailver mail Rose up like stars, and pattered down like hail, While the blunt whale, ponderous in his glee, Churned his broad flukes and siphoned up the sea."
Such is the general level of Mr. Campbell's voice, invigorating, hefty, prodigious. This is his first published book, and it will set many people speculating on his future.
The American series of The Best Short Stories of 1928 (Cape) comes to relieve the dullness of the fiction we have received this week. Mr. E. J. O'Brien, the editor of the volume, has already proved himself more fit for the post of judge than most anthologists and selectors. Messrs. Constable send us the complete Norwich Edition of The Works of George Borrow, edited by Mr. Clement Shorter ; and Messrs. Heine- mann proceed religiously with the Manaton Edition of The Works of John Galsworthy : they have just published four new volumes, The Freelands, The Dark Flower, Beyond, and The Saint's Progress. Fragments from My Diary, by Maxim Gorki (Philip Allan), must contain interesting material, but we are always rendered a little suspicious of the authority, authenticity, and reliability of the translation when the translator's name is suppressed. Who chose the fragments to be translated, Gorki or the translator himself ?
The Loeb Library (Heinemann) has produced six volumes more : the translations of Herodotus, Livy, Plautus, Ovid, and the Lyra Graeca are continued, and the history of Rome by Velleius Paterculus, Res Gestae Divi Augusti, is given us complete in one volume. Two very important volumes are published in Messrs. Benn's series of Contemporary British Artists, studies of Stanley Spencer and Henry Lamb, with reproductions from their work. THE LITERARY Enrron.
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