Books Reviewed

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 411, 20 July 1928, Page 14

Books Reviewed

A MODERN POET. MR J. REDWOOD ANDERSON, whose new books o£ poems, “Vortex,” is published in admirably neat form by the new firm, of Victor Gollanez, Ltd., throws himself into the stress and clangour of the modern world to interpret it through a modern’s technique. His verse is of that irregular kind so often used in modern poetic descriptions; and Mr Anderson sometimes justifies himself—perhaps more often that most poets who follow this method. But a whole book of such experiments persuades one in the eud that it is easier to be slack within this freedom than to draw power from it. Mr Anderson looks boldly about him—the streets, the market, a great crane, the city riverside, the shipyard, a theatre-queue, the roundabout at a fair, the tattoed woman, a modern dictator, dynamos, a viaduct, a Labour mass meeting, these are some of his subjects. He moves about in to-day’s world with a lively sense of what life has grown from, a vigorous hope of what it is to grow to. He sees design in life. Yet his descriptions, though full of arresting phrases, seem to want being and breath, as a whole. Is it the explanation of this that they are descriptions put into verse, and not expressions of an experience itself poetic and expressible only in and as poetry. Roughly, Mr-Anderson has his ups and owns between such passages as this, about a crane:

It stuns The rapt attention, and it lifts More than its load of many tons; More than the turbine swung on high So easily, A toy fn its great grasp of steel, and this, from “In the Sick-room”: A bell Chimed in the city, and the lazy hour Fell Like an owl’s heavy flight from some grey tower; While a ghost of sound rose to her, thinned By sun-sbot distance, trembled and gently died. “The Vortex.” .T. Redwood Anderson. Victor Gollanez, Ltd. Our copy from the publishers. William Le Queux’s Last Novel “At least tell me this,” he said. “Was there a woman in the Prior’s Room, or Prior’s Tower, on the night of Jack’s murder, besides Dr. Laidlaw ?” Wilfred looked at him in silence for a while, then he said slowly: “There were three women there!” There is only one thing to do when one comes on such a situation in a William Le Queux novel that is to read on—faster and faster. One does,