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BRIEFER MENTION
Fox Footprints, by Elizabeth J. Coatsworth (12mo, 79 pages; Knopf: $1.50) is a Cook's tour of the East, with halts in Siam, India, Tahiti, and a stop-over of two months in China and Japan. Decoration, quaintness, exoticism, images. The moon over the tropics is a white curved bud, whereas the moon over Japan is compared aptly to a butterfly. There is no property more stage-worn than the moon, and the dents of time persist even when its cardboard disc has been painted over with all the nice colours of Miss Coatsworth's lunar and exotic vocabulary.
Charlatan, by Louis Grudin (12mo, 62 pages; Lieber & Lewis: $1.50) contains niceties of craftsmanship at the service, mostly, of fancy and fantasy. Mr Grudin concentrates, not upon the direct conveyance of an emotion, but upon the construction of a decorative, unexpected, and distorting armour to encase his feelings, or rather he sews together "his good fur coat of despair." We recognize the coat, but the despair is imperceptible: he gets the armour, but fails to establish the emotions. Irony, the grim disparity between a strong desire and its miscarriage in deed, cannot grow from a bare assumption of the desire and an embroidery of the deed. Mr Grudin, however, has more restraint than Bodenheim, his chief influence, and a poem like Diary shows a trend away from the rhetoric of sheer ingenuity.
April Twilights, by Willa Cather (8vo, 66 pages; Knopf: $2) consists largely of verses reprinted from an earlier volume with the same title. It was the epilogue to that first voyage to Europe from which the poet returns with a portfolio of classical memories: Antinous, Delphi, Poppies on Ludlow Castle, the dialect of Robert Burns, and finally the expected Envoi, which like the others is perfectly imitated, quotable, dead. Her later verses are American, even Nebraskan in their subjects, but their form is equally and coldly perfect. They give the impression of being cast, accurately, into a mould which was not intended for them; they lack redeeming inconsistencies and never vary from a pattern which is fixed by the first line. It might have been Miss Cather who inspired Boileau to write: "Un style trop égal et toujours uniforme / En vain brille à nos yeux, il faut qu'il nous endorme."
The Love-Rogue, by Harry Kemp (12mo, 229 pages; Lieber & Lewis: $1.75) is a rather free rendering of the Spanish drama of Tirso de Molina. The translator has been successful in catching the lyric qualities of the work, no less than the dramatic; he has done a welcome literary service in making available this source of all the multifarous Don Juan dramas, and has rounded out his assignment by a lively introduction and an exhaustive bibliography.
The Modern Traveller, by Hilaire Belloc (illus., 12mo, 80 pages; Knopf: $1.50) has satirical overtones of W. S. Gilbert and nonsensical overtones of Lewis Carroll, although it does not strike quite the same vibrant cords in either mood. The lines have a sting to them, and the entire expedition is a gay absurdity in verse of quick tempo and deft rhyming. The narrative lacks, however, in urbanity, and consequently—one hazards—in permanence.
