Gordon Bottomley : Poems and Plays. With an introduction by
Claude Colleer Abbott. (Bodley Head. 30s.) GORDON Borroauxv has never been the poet of the many; - his plays are too short to make commercial production easy, and his achievement runs so contrary to the fashion of the moment that an unthinking critic might be tempted to dismiss his work with a kindly shrug. Bottomley's brief blaze of fame showed him great among the " Geor- gians" in " E.M.'s " famous anthology : yet even to see him in that setting is to mis- place him. Professor Abbott, in an intro- duction of masterly restraint and skill, shows his deep understanding and apprecia-; —lion of one who was a true inheritor of the Victorian poetic genius. A Northerner with Scottish affinities, Bottomley, when he turned to the great themes of old legend for the background of his plays, brought to them a new, clear breath of realism—a biting wind from the mountains, the scent of earth turning from the plough-share, the peat-smoke out of the homely hearths of the North-West. His poetry has the same clean,' direct application of deep truth which underlies the legendary subjects of his plays, and at their best both are made vital : "Poetry is founded on the hearts of men." Bottomley believed intensely in the beauty and worth of a man's own creation, the craft of each individual heart and hand— hence the condemnation of " machines for making more machines," and his work for the Community Drama. His own little house, perched on a wooded hill looking north to the Lake District and west across Morecambe Bay to Cartmel, was a shrine of the arts, and he the presiding genius. With his gentle voice and the tremulous fingers stroking and plucking at the luxuriant beard, he was a figure of past graciousness as apart from the ordinary as his own poems and plays. He is not likely to be forgotten : but he is now so much in the shadow that this volume comes as a timely chance for readers to re-discover a too much neglected poet and a master of the poetic
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