OTHER POETRY.

Ma. G. K. Cur.srizeroN has lately visited America. The sinister influences of Prohibition and Edgar Allan. Poe are apparent in every page of his new book of verse, The Ballad of St. Barbara (Cecil Palmer, 7s. 6d. net). The fact may be

unsatisfactory to those who like their " G. K. C." as a pamph- leteer, but on the other hand it will be welcomed by lovers of poetry. Some of the poems will compare in coloured grandeur of language with anything Mr. Chesterton has yet written.

They are mainly of war and peace, and the inferior cynic and social satirist is rarely permitted to crowd out the poet. In Mrs. Katharine Tynan's Evensong (Blackwell, 8s. net) we

have some charming lines about " the sweets of all the honey- bells gathered to a flask or pomander," and " the gold of honey- dropping wells, spice and amber, oil and nard." The familiar

religious note is everywhere. No poet sounds it more delicately and sincerely, although Mr. Wilfred Rowland Childe, a young writer lately down from Oxford University, has already made poetry as rich as a stained-glass window. The Gothic Rose (Blackwell, 5s. net), a book of fifty ballads and lyrics, is deeply tinged with the fervour and ceremonial mediaevalism

of a Pre-Raphaelite. Sometimes Mr. Childe's verse has marked sensuous expressiveness, and we might readily believe him to be the coming poet of Romanism had he not told the rollicking story of " How Bobbin Dick Prayed to Saint Anthony " so wickedly well. Mr. Childe should be thankful that his muse was not pounced upon at birth and borne away, like Mr. R. H. Forster's, into a garden whose " nature " has long since gone out of it—the garden of mediaeval romance

in mediaeval form, as exemplified in Two Romances in Verse (Jonathan Cape, 6s. net). At the other extreme is Miss Susan Miles, whose vers librist experiment in Annotations (Milford, 4s. 6d. net) we like far less than the pieces wherein she makes some sort of acknowledgment to poetical form

and its conventions :-

" In the earliest, tenderest spring of the year

Pale brown are the larches, Dabbled here and there With gold, pale gold, pure gold."

The second section of Miss Miles's volume consists chiefly of the staccato outpourings of a human tape-machine clipped off into uneven lengths of line, but her point of view has a pleasing pungency. By contrast Mrs. Anna De Bary's

Lyrics (D. O'Connor, 5s. net) are gentle and fugitive, with cool, refreshing moments ; we wish the material form of her volume had been more worthy of them. The minor key in Songs of Love and Grief, by Mrs. Georgette Agnew (Constable,

5s. net), is dwelt on to excess. When the brighter vein of " The Lake of Life," a courageous piece that might almost

be reckoned as a technical tour de force, becomes the model of more of this author's poetry she will do much better work. ' Balkan Songs " and " Isolation," the latter reprinted from the Fortnightly Review, are the most distinctive pieces in As the Wind Blew, by Miss Amelie Rives, Princess Troubetsky (Hurst and Blackett, 5s. net). They are full of graceful strength, and one of the songs, " After Love," with its refrain,

" The ashes on my hearth are red, but not with fire," is finely

harsh and altogether successful. Were such a piece only a translation, its original writer would have much pride in Miss Rives's share in the result. To-morrow, by Miss Mary Morison Webster, is the product of good sound craftsmanship and a good ear:

" Twmorrow, when the earth is new

With April shower and waking bud, When the long pathway through the wood No longer green for me and you, Is green again for younger blood."

Miss Webster's work is pretty certain to be noticed sooner or later by the anthologists. Mr. John Helston's, of course, should have been noticed by them long since. His Broken. Shade (Chapman and Hall, 5s. net) is studded with authentic passages. The old power of his " Aphrodite " is everywhere, especially in " Binsey Head," a long and tragic piece. But in neither of two new, rather irresponsibly compiled anthologies, English Verse : Old and New, edited by Mr. G. C. F. Meid and

Mr. R. C. Clift (Cambridge University Press, 6s. net), and The New Spirit in Verse, edited for readers and reciters by

Mr. E. Pertwee (Routledge, 3s. 6d. net), does Mr. Helston's name appear. And yet how can we expect such a miracle in

the case of the first of these collections, from which the names of Mr. Hardy and Mr. W. H. Davies are absent ? The second collection has an advantage over its rival through the inclusion of a certain amount of hitherto unanthologized work, although its " new spirit " (whatever that may be) is represented by nothing whatsoever from the less conventional among the younger generation. Instead there arc pieces such as that from Mr. Squire which begins When London was a little town Lean by the river's marge, The poet paced it with a frown, He thought it very large."

A more interesting contribution by Mr. Squire to current anthologies is the charming essay with which he introduces Poems About Birds, edited by Mr. IL J. Massingham (Fisher Unwin, 10s. 6d. net). While the editor's general selection is good, he has surely allowed his propagandist zeal to get the better of his poetic judgment when he gives up two valuable pages to Mr. Hodgson's merely topical " Hymn to Moloch " ? And are there so few contemporary poems about birds that he can spare fifteen pages for what too often must be classed as the minor effusions of John Clare ?