“The book contains rough out-door poems of land and sea, songs of sailors at sea driving to strange lands, and impressions of tramps by campfire and their visions of the Christ, and many others.” (St Louis) “Most of the sea poems were written long after Mr Kemp had ceased to sail before the mast, but the impressions that those early years made upon him have hardly faded.” (N Y Times)
“For those who know that splendid play Mr Kemp wrote on Judas when he gave his version of Judas’s purpose in the betrayal will find his poems of New Testament life full of power and a strange loveliness. If one had a doubt as to whether Mr Kemp would finally reach a development of his gifts where he would no longer be accepted with qualifications, that doubt, it seems to me, vanished with this volume.” W: S. Braithwaite
+ Boston Transcript p6 S 1 ’20 1300w Dial 70:109 Ja ’21 40w
“One can not share Mr Kemp’s expressed conviction that he has found ‘the immortal meaning of it all.’ At least, if he has found it, he has not succeeded in transferring it to the assorted verses which are gathered here.” L. B.
− Freeman 1:622 S 8 ’20 210w
“Mr Kemp’s new volume is a disappointment. He was fastidious before, though generous enough in thought and gesture; now he finds room for commonplace and cant, complacency and swagger.” Mark Van Doren
− + Nation 111:sup414 O 13 ’20 100w
“Full of buoyancy and swinging rhythms.”
+ N Y Times p16 N 7 ’20 160w St Louis 18:247 O ’20 30w