POETRY READINGS

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28653, 1 August 1958, Page 7

POETRY READINGS

Essie Clark And Keith' Jacobson

At Maryknoll last evening Essie Clark and Keith Jacobson gave a varied programme of poetry readings. The works presented werer both new and old. with the main emphasis upon the writers of the Romantic and subsequent periods. Mrs Clark’s approach was the more dramatic, and this enabled her to interpret such pieces as Sitwell’s “Mrs Hague” and “Lord and Lady Romfort” with considerable effect. The group of poems from Blake’s “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience,” were all treated differently, and the meaning of each sensitively conveyed. With the selections from Keats, on the other hand, Mrs Clark did not reveal as sure a touch; but together with Keith Jacobson she caught the spirit of Gerard Hopkins’s “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo.” This is something of an achievement, as the work makes great demands upon the reader’s powers of interpretation, in every phrase, and tests his understanding of the poet’s aim. Mr Jacobson showed himself attracted to dramatic monologue last evening, and in the first half of the programme his Browning item, “My Last Duchess,” seemed more/? successful than the somewhat derivative monologue from Gerard Manley Hopkins. The group of modern Japanese poetry, however, was unexpected and attractive, and here Mr Jacobson was at his best in “Fair Japan” and- “Japan for Sightseeing.” In the modern section the poems of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice were given with admirable point and humour.

The readers were again heard together in an inconsequential dialogue by Tagore and in a more measured and weighty chorus from T. S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral.” Mrs Clark’s courageous interpretation of Dylan Thomas’s “Hunchback in the Park” was moving: it gave the hearer more than Wilfrid Owen’s rather arid “Strange Meeting” which followed. The programme was concluded by a reading from the thirteenth chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians. During the evening pianoforte solos were played by Maureen Gill. —C.E.S.