crete and explicit. Curiously enough, though we pointed out improvements made upon that poem by the cowboys, there is not another poem in the book that is not in the natural order of speech, and a part of the power of this author comes from that fact. And High Chin Bob, as I like to call it, is not by any means the only good poem in this book. There are poems certain to please not only the old "cow-men," but the most arrant tenderfoot who has never worn chaps or spurs; and poems such as The Cowboy's Prayer or The Christmas Trail are as good as Riley. Here are the first and last stanzas of the latter:

The wind is blowin' cold down the mountain tips of snow
And cross the ranges layin' brown and dead;

It's cryin' through the valley trees that wear the mistletoe
And mournin' with the gray clouds overhead.

Yet it's sweet with the beat of my little hawse's feet
And I whistle like the air was warm and blue;

For I'm ridin' up the Christmas trail to you,

Old Folks,

I'm a-ridin' up the Christmas trail to you.

The coyote's winter howl cuts the dusk behind the hill,
But the ranch's shinin' window I kin see;

And though I don't deserve it, and I reckon never will,

There'll be room beside the fire kep' for me.

Skimp my plate 'cause I'm late. Let me hit the old kid gait,
For tonight I'm stumblin' tired of the new.

And I'm ridin' up the Christmas trail to you,

Old Folks,

I'm a-ridin' up the Christmas trail to you.

&

In God's Reserves, The Plainsmen and The Westerner Mr. Clark proves that he writes straightforward verse as well as the colloquial, while many songs in the latter vein.

have the same kind of good fun that we find in High Chin Bob. This is not, by the way, the only song of Mr. Clark's that the cowboys have appropriated. Mr. Lomax has a cowboy version of Ridin', the first poem in this book; and when I read A Border Affair I recognized it as a song that I had heard sung by Orville Cox, a cowboy from Taos, New Mexico. Apparently, when the cowboys find a song they like they fit it to music that they know already or make up, adding unique phrases and quavers and cowboy yells of their own.

Grass-grown Trails, which is just out, does not tempt me away from the earlier volume. Perhaps its author is becoming too civilized.

I have said that Mr. Clark proves himself an equal of James Whitcomb Riley, and I don't know that any further appreciation is necessary, unless it be in the words of an old "cow-man": "You can break me if there's a dead poem in it. I read the hull twenty-two-I don't know how Clark knowed, but he knows!" And Mr. Clark knows, too, that love of the West of which I spoke in the beginning:

When the last free trail is a prim, fenced land,
And our graves grow weeds through forgetful Mays,
Richer and statelier then you'll reign,

Mother of men whom the world will praise.

And your sons will love you and sigh for you,
Labor and battle and die for you,

But never the fondest will understand

The way we have loved you, young, young land!

A. C. H.

FIRST BOOKS AND OTHERS

One might pluck a nosegay from the books of brief lyrics which come to POETRY for review. It would be a pretty nosegay too-fresh flowers, delicate fragrance, fair colors. Nothing startling in the bunch, rarely anything wild or woodsy, but mostly simple garden flowers, which have been watered and tended, and which surely deserve a place in the quiet rooms of the mind. One rarely finds passion in them, but often the beauty of quieter emotions, expressed with fit simplicity and sometimes with a certain distinction. Airs and Ballads, by John McClure. Alfred A. Knopf.

Here, for example, is John McClure, who has a light foot and a singing voice. His attitude is in the initial poem, Apology:

I am a poetaster,

And my knee I bend
To Marlowe my master,
Villon my friend.

I am a swashbuckler,

And I break my sword
Before Blake my tutor,
Shakespeare my lord.

I should burn my song-books
This very day

If singing didn't matter
So little anyway.

I said "attitude" unconsciously, but there is too much attitude in many of the poems—in their motive and phrasing. Such a poem as Home, for example, is spoiled by the "merry mad loves" in its middle stanzas. And how can a

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poet be guilty of such triteness as To a Lady, or the Almighty God poem which follows it, when he is capable of so soft and tender a song as The Dream?

In a strange grove of poplars

In a strange far place,

She came to me between the trees
With white death on her face.

She came between the poplar trees
And wandered at my side:
It was beyond the mind of man
To think that she had died.

It was beyond the mind of man
Even to dream her dead.

I knew the music of her voice
In every word she said.

A Book of Verse, by Morris Gilbert. Privately printed.

The author of this thin volume, privately printed last summer, has been in active service aboard a submarine chaser for somewhat more than a year. If a few of the lyrics miss poetry in an obvious effort at sophistication, that is a natural-enough error in the first book of a very young poet, and one that Mr. Gilbert has, no doubt, already outgrown while rubbing shoulders with reality. It is the several poems on Germany that are most appealing. In Prussians Don't Believe in Dreams, to which POETRY gave an honorable mention last November, and in Germany, is a fresh and wholly delightful naiveté of wonder that Grimm's people and Heine's should show themselves as the Germans of these years. There is light-heartedness and whimsical

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humor in Irish Kisses and John-a-Dreams, and in Wars Are for Youth to Wage a note at once more personal and of greater universality:

Wars are for Youth to wage: not even Death
Can make of war a greater thing than Youth-
So that when It comes walking in the dawn,
Some lad will laugh, exulting to be gone,
In witness to the youngest ageless truth
That honor is more beautiful than breath.

A book of unusual promise.

Verses in Peace and War, by Shane Leslie. Charles Scribner's Sons.

A strain thin but clear may be heard in this tiny volume, like a reed-note at evening. Some of the poems are devotional-The Trinity, Holy Cross and Saint John the Baptist, for example. And there are love poems and epitaphs for soldiers, all unmistakably, even poignantly, sincere. In this one a dead sentry begins the dialogue:

"Who passeth here?"-"We of the new brigade,

Who come in aid—to take your place who fell." "What is the countersign?" "That we have weighed The cost ye paid, yet come!" "Pass! all is well." And here is a singularly beautiful epitaph for an aviator: Another one of mortal birth

Hath set his spirit free.

Lie very lightly on him, Earth,
Who did not tread on thee.

The book has a quiet distinction.

Loves and Losses of Pierrot, by William Griffith. Robert

J. Shores.