* _The Cry of Youth. By Harry Kemp._ (Kennerley: $1.25 net.) Terse
ringing ballads of modern life with much of Buchanan’s quality and keen
technique. Despite the propagandist note, which is less insistent than
in most poetry of a socialistic tendency, Mr. Kemp has succeeded with
some quiet reserve in making the reader feel the pity of lonely outcast
life, and in expressing his philosophy in genuine poetry. The sincerity
of his work is unquestionable, and the volume merits a critical
attention on its merits which we should be anxious to assist. _The Cry
of Youth_ is not written solely for an audience of poets and critics. It
is genuine poetry of cruelly naked emotion borne unflinchingly.
* _Songs of the Dead End. By Patrick MacGill._ (Kennerley: $1.25 net.)
Poetry of labor and poetry without a brief in about equal measure.
Though the former is fine, Mr. MacGill’s best work is to be found in the
latter. The poet has been a navvy, a miner, a switchman, a car-coupler,
a tramp, and a plate-layer, and out of grinding poverty and toil his
poetry has emerged. There is danger of a wrong emphasis on his social
poetry. It is good, but not better than that of several others. The less
premeditated lyrics will give the greatest pleasure to the reader, and
to many of them one will turn again and again.
* _Philip the King, and Other Poems. By John Masefield._ (Macmillan:
$1.25 net.) A one-act play in verse which is competent but would not be
distinctive were it not for a superb ballad of the Armada, which
challenges comparison with Drayton. Four other poems of strong beauty
which redeem the rest of the volume, and make it necessary to poetry
lovers. The notable war-poem entitled _August, 1914_, is included.
* _The Wine-Press: A Tale of War. By Alfred Noyes._ (Stokes: $.60 net.)
A tale of the horror of war and its blind futility, whose scene is laid
in the Balkans. It is told with all of Mr. Noyes’s art and its awful
lesson should be particularly timely in the midst of the present
struggle. The poem is a hymn to liberty passionately voiced, and brings
death and suffering home in relentless poetry.
* _Songs of Labor, and Other Poems. By Morris Rosenfeld. Translated
from the Yiddish by Rose Pastor Stokes and Helena Frank._ (Badger: $.75
net.) An excellent translation of the poems of an American Yiddish poet
of poignant beauty, whose work has hitherto not been accessible to
English readers except in an incomplete prose version. The present
translation includes many poems now published for the first time, and is
adorned with two remarkable illustrations in black and white which
reveal new possibilities in line. A volume which deserves to go through
many editions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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