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BRIEFER MENTION
The Sardonic Arm, by Maxwell Bodenheim (8vo, 58 pages; Covici-McGee: $3.50) is written according to the formula of his other volumes: words tossed rashly about and sometimes hitting their mark, fantasy and fantastic irony, a mob of excited metaphors. Though he never or rarely imitates another poet, Bodenheim imitates his earlier verses frequently, with the result that his name is in danger of becoming the label on a package, certifying that it contains honest goods of a certain expected weight and quality. Sometimes there is a prize in the package: a metaphor of unexpected justness or the illumination of a new character. His work is sometimes careless and sometimes exhilarating; it is never mediocre.
The Poems of Alice Meynell (8vo, 144 pages; Scribner: $2) contains the whole of her poetry: a gross of lyrics of which the longest barely reaches a hundred lines. Nothing she wrote was second-rate or careless. It is a shock to realize that she was the model of the whole brood of female singers who have infested the past two decades, and that her austere quatrains were the pattern followed by all the young ladies who embroider verses in the spirit with which their grandmothers made doilies. She is immensely better than any of her imitators. She has personality, a background, an undeniable and unbelievable command of English metres. There is nobody in England to-day who can write one sort of verse like Alice Meynell, but if there were he would hardly choose to write that style of verse.
Going to the Sun, by Vachel Lindsay (8vo, 101 pages; Appleton: $1.75) is a book of happy doggerel illustrated with Lindsay's own drawings, which are rather more amusing than the text and never much worse in technique. Their lines are intricately drawn, and firm; his verse is written sloppily. Flat thymes and a vocabulary without surprises mar the expression of a fancy which is childlike and fresh at its best; at the worst it is merely childish.
Preludes, by John Drinkwater (12mo, 61 pages; Houghton, Mifflin: $1.25). This series of narrative and dramatic poems is dominated by an old theme, and yet a theme perennially new—the triumph and the exaltation of love. Mr Drinkwater writes with feeling, and at times almost with passion, yet his poetry is noticeably uneven in quality; it is annoyingly interspersed with passages of prose, and gives somewhat the effect of a green landscape dotted with boulders. In tone and character his verse bears a certain resemblance to that of Edwin Arlington Robinson, but he has not Mr Robinson's tendency to tedious psychological discourses.
Rock-Flower, by Jeanne Robert Foster (12mo, 118 pages; Boni & Liveright: $1.75) contains a dedication to John Butler Yeats and verses to Michael Collins, Brancusi, the moon, Oscar Wilde, and other international figures. In addition there are Verses for Japanese Prints (four lines of decoration on a blank page); Songs to Evin, of a primitive sexual symbolism; the Celtic twilight of Winds in Wild Grass; finally, three poems in prose. The book as a whole is full of echoes, but it possesses a sort of vigorous and unsubtle charm, without surprises.
