A BUNCH OF POETS.
Mr. Obadiah Geek has broken his long silence to some purpose. Those who remember his pre-war achievements in the field of polychromatic romanticism will hardly be prepared for his present development, which lifts him at a bound from the overcrowded ranks of lyric-writers to the uncongested heights whereon recline the great masters of epic poetry. And yet it was perhaps inevitable. The thunder and the reek of war (the last two years of which, we believe, were spent by Mr. Geek in the Egg Control Department) could scarcely have failed to imprint their mark on the author of Eros in Eruption; and so he has given us a real epic, whose very title, Ad Astra, is symbolic of the high altitudes in which he so triumphantly and so securely navigates. Outwardly it is a story of the War, but there is little difficulty in probing the allegory; and those who follow the hero's vicissitudes as a private in the Gasoliers, right through to his victorious advancement to the rank of Acting Lance-Corporal, unpaid (and there is a symbolism even in the "unpaid"), will readily supply the application to the affairs of everyday life.
The ten thousand odd lines of this inspired poem are liberally enlivened with those characteristic flashes which Mr. Geek's previous efforts have led us to expect. Nothing could be happier than the following, descriptive of the hero's early days on the barrack-square:—
The Sergeant rolled his eyes toward the azure
And called down curses on my bloody head...
"You buzz about," his peroration ran,
"Like a bluebottle in a sugar-bowl.
Thank God we have a Navy!" and my feet,
Turned outward, as they had been drilled to turn,
At forty-five degrees or thereabouts,
Itched to join issue with his swollen paunch;
But I refrained.
Or again:—
Fame, the skyscraper, hath a thousand floors;
And some toil slowly upward, stair by stair,
And stagger and halt and faint upon the way;
Others, more fortunate, achieve the top
At one swift elevation, by the lift.
Mr. Geek, whatever his method of progression may have been, has certainly "achieved the top"—if indeed he has not gone over it.
In Throbs, Miss Gramercy Gingham-Potts reveals a depth of feeling and delicacy of expression that should secure her the right of entry to every art-calendar and birthday-book. Her Muse is, perhaps, a trifle anæmic, but to many none the less interesting on that account; its very fragility, in fact, constitutes its chief appeal. She has an engaging gift of definition that, combined with a keen appreciation of the obvious, makes her verses particularly susceptible to quotation. For instance:—
The maiden asked, "What is a kiss?"
The poet wrote:
"Kisses are stamps that frank with bliss
Love's contract-note."
While for effectively studied simplicity it would be difficult to match the lyrical gem to which Miss Gingham-Potts has given the arresting title, "Farewell":—
The birds sing sweet in Summer;
The daisies hear their song;
But Winter's come, and they are dumb
So long.
I told my love in Summer,
So pure and brave and strong;
But frosts came on; my love is gone;
So long!
A new volume by the author of Swings and Roundabouts is something of an event; and in Bottles and Jugs Mr. Ughtred Biggs makes another fascinating raid on the garbage-bins of London's underworld. Mr. Biggs is a stark realist, and his unminced meat may prove too strong for some stomachs; but those who can digest the fare he offers will find it wonderfully sustaining. Here is no condiment of verbiage, no dressing of the picturesque. Life is served up high, and almost raw. By way of illustration we cannot do better than quote from the opening poem, "Bill's Wife," in which the calculated roughness of the rhythm is redolent of the pervading atmosphere:—
At the corner of the street
Stands the Blue-faced Pig;
Outside a barrel-organ is playing
And the people are dancing a jig.
A woman waits there grimly;
Her eyes are set and her lips drawn thin;
For Bill, her man, is in the public,
Soaking his soul in gin.
Students of sociology might do worse than devote careful attention to these gaunt chronicles of Slumland.
The following stanzas, taken from a poem entitled "Reconstruction," are a favourable example of Mr. Thor Pinmoney's somewhat unequal genius:—
By strife we live, but boredom slays;
My mind from out this office strays
And takes me back to the spacious days
When I counted socks in Ordnance.
I hate my pen; I hate my stool;
What am I but a nerveless tool?
But we did not work by rote or rule
When I counted socks in Ordnance....
There are times even now when it really seems
I'm back in a suburb of shell-shocked Rheims;
But the office echoes my waking screams
When I find it was only in my dreams
I was counting socks in Ordnance.
Unfortunately, all Mr. Pinmoney's efforts do not come up to this standard, and we should be almost inclined to wonder whether the writer has not after all mistaken his vocation, were it not for the really brilliant piece of work which brings the volume (Pegasus Comes Home) to a close. We make no apology for reproducing this masterpiece in full:—
Man comes
And goes.
What then?
Who knows?
Here we have the whole philosophy of life and the life hereafter summed up. If he never writes another line Mr. Pinmoney is by this assured of a permanent place in the anthology of post-bellum poetry.
"Replying to the toast of his health, Mr. Lloyd George said it was a great boon that a large industrial community should have been founded amongst these lovely surroundings, a boon not only for the workers, but also for their little children, who would have the advantage of being reared in georgeous mountain air."—Daily Paper.
Lloyd-Georgeous, in fact.
