A Rough Walk Home and other Poems. By Lilian Bowes
Lyon (Cape. 2s. 6d.)
THE sixteen poems (one French) in this small book were written during years of war and almost continuous pain. This may partly account for their quality of sensitiveness and vivid inward experience —which- is sometimes fused with the image seen, so that the reader is left groping for the meaning. By her elision, omission of links, quick shifting of ground, Miss Bowes Lyon is Occasionally obscure, as in her haunting and evocative poem, The New Snow, whose Ipt line, " Paled into man how pure is Christ," with its touch cf Gerard Manley Hopkins's ecstatic economy, remains elusive in meaning even after many readings. Nevertheless, this poetry, with its flashes of external beauty and inward understanding, repays the reader's effort, disclosing spiritual adventure which is personal and yet universal. The poem after which the collection is named is the story of a snow- storm and the finding of shelter in a barn and then a moment of union.
" Far I have come, to you I loved long since, Forgotten, yet the core of my remembering. Asleep, and not aware yet they are slumbering, Men walk alone. Is this, then, the awakening? "
In this small collection with its loose or no rhymes and free rhythms (sc that there is no limiting,,nf the sincerity), and its individual use of language, there is more of value, of shaped first-hand experiencet, than in most longer volumes of verse published today.
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