Shorter Notices
Orion, a Miscellany. Volume III. Edited by C. Day Lewis, D. Kil- barn Roberts and Rosamond Lehmann. (Nicolson and Watson. 6s.) Oktoies editors are keeping their creation smoothly on the lines on which it started off during the war. The choice between poetry and short story, literary and art criticism, is as deftly balanced-as before. The best items in this volume seemed to this reader to be an astute examination of the furniture of a " reading child's " mind by Miss Elizabeth Bowen, a poem on sitting for his portrait by Mr. Day Lewis, a vision of the world as it appeared to a three-:year-old by Mr.
Laurie Lee and two studies of insects by Mr. William Sansom. Against these we must place, regretfully, a good deal of dross.' Two singularly uninteresting pieces of prose by the Misses Stevie Smith and Jean Howard seem-unworthy of a place in this collection. A series of Reflections on Rimbaud adds little to our enjoyment or our knowledge of that poet while an essay on The Wings of the Dove might have been helpful had it not been for the much superior analysis of this book by Mr. F. 0. Matthiessen in his Henry lames : The Major Phase, with which the writer seems unfamiliar. Another of the fashionable reconsiderations of Milton and some ruminations in Portugal in 1940 add to the period taint which gently pervades the pages of this volume. The stiff binding and high standards of production of Orion serve to emphasise the ephemeral quality of some of the contents. In fifty years' time such miscellanies may seem typical of our epoch. In prose as well as poetry the current idiom is difficult and at times obscure. Some of the papers in this volume suggest that it can, within its own terms, become profoundly con- ventional as well.
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