These are free verse, imagiste poems. In the group “Sun-up,” the poet sees the world through a child’s eyes and gives us glimpses of a child’s soul. All the poems express modernity, a free spirit and a turbulent world. They are grouped under the headings: Sun-up; Monologues; Windows; Secrets; Portraits; Sons of Belial; Reveille—the last group containing lines to Alexander Berkman, to Emma Goldman and to Larkin.
“No adult knows what little girls think about, but one is willing to believe that it is approximately what he finds here, where Freud rather than Plato is read back into the infant mind.” D. M.
+ Nation 112:sup244 F 9 ’21 340w
“The series of poems from which the book takes its name are vividly poignant renderings of the child-mind, intimate in their apperception and flaring forth in arresting magic and color at times. Her method is free verse, but it is a distinct free verse. It is the sudden throwing of vivid phrases before one that conjure up limitless thoughts.” H. S. Gorman
+ N Y Times p11 Ja 9 ’21 520w
RIDSDALE, KNOWLES. Gate of fulfillment. *$1.50 (4c) Putnam
20–6634
A story told in letters. Margaret Bevington, a very charming and brilliant widow, answers an unusual advertisement calling for a secretary for an invalid. The invalid, who is also a misogynist, sends her a caustic reply declining her services, but a correspondence develops out of the incident. Later, learning that the secretary he had preferred to her had proved incompetent, she applies in person under an assumed name and is engaged. She then leads a double life, as staid, prim Martha Pratt and as witty Margaret Bevington, and the misogynist finds himself falling in love with two women. The tonic good sense of one and the mental stimulus of the other do their work. He is restored to health to learn that the two characters who have meant so much to him combine into one person.