DENNIS AND THE BRIDGE

Southland Times, Issue 21773, 30 July 1932, Page 11

DENNIS AND THE BRIDGE

The Sentimental Bloke has seen Sydney’s Bridge. In other words C. J. Dennis has written what the Bloke would have said in eulogy of the structure which gave de Groot a chance to make a sensation and annoy Mr J. T. Lang. It carries as its title “I dips me lid,” and in it the Bloke revisits Sydney “after many years” to stand astounded before the Bridge. It has been published by Lewis Berger and Sons (Australia) Ltd., of Rhodes (N. S.W.) whose paints were used on the Bridge.

HELP THAT IS NEEDED

In these days almost everyone is personally interested in taxation. The income taxation assessment forms have supplied material for jokes, but the operations of the taxation in aid of the Unemployment Fund has made those forms look like a sum in simple addition. To-day every man is puzzled about what and when he has to pay something to the Unemployment Fund and so he will relish such a work as “Unemployment Taxation” by T. N. Gibbs, who sets out to answer all the questions he can imagine he should be asked and a few he should not. It is written in plain terms, designed to meet the needs of the layman as well as those of the legal profession and it should save by lightening worry, or ending uncertainty more than the fee asked for it. An excellent guide. “Unemployment Taxation” by T, N. Gibbs, is published by Messrs Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd., Christchurch, whence came my copy. IN ADDITION. Last week I forgot to say that my copy of “Mighty Moments” came to me through the N.Z. Bible Depot. IN DEMAND AT THE LIBRARY Following are the books inquired for at the Library during the month:— —Fiction.— 1. “White Gold,” by O. Binns. 2. “Perilous Love,” by F. Riddell. 3 “Manor House,” by N. Syrrett. 4. “Props,” by N. Jacob. 5. “Needlewatcher,” by R. Blaker. 6. “Wild Orchid,” by S. Undset. —Classes.— 1. “Log of a U Boat Commander,” by E. Hoshagen. 2. “Footsloggers,” by G. S. Hutchison. 3. “Trial of Dr. Smethurst,” ed. L. A. Parry. 4. “Nights of London,” by H. C. V. Morton. 5. “Fear and be Slain,” by Rt. Hon. J. E. B. Seely. 6. “Two Lone Ships,” by G. Kopp. LONDON’S DEMAND The following books were in keenest demand in London early last month:— Fiction.—Hilda Vaughan’s “The Soldier and the Gentlewoman” (Gollancz); Barbara Worsley Gough’s “Public Affairs” (Gollancz); Leo Walmsley’s “Three Fevers” (Cape); Richard Blaker’s “The Needle-Watcher” (Heinemann). Miscellaneous.—Lady Duff Gordon s “Discretions and Indiscretions” (Jarrolds); L. Curtis’s “Capital Question of China” (Macmillan); M. R .Rinehart’s “My Story” (Cassell); Edith Sitwell’s “Bath” (Faber and Faber). FROM POETRY TO PROSE What appears to be Mr Walter de la Mare’s final conversion from verse to imaginative prose as the medium of his most ambitious work, is a portentous sign of the literary times. It is hard to believe that a poet of his genius, one moreover whose skill . in the management of verse is nothing short of phenomenal,- can be content to confine himself permanently to prose narrative. But it is some six years since Mr de la Mare has published a volume of serious verse and his name no longer appears under isolated poems in the periodical Press. During that time he has given us several volumes of exceptionally rich prose — short stories, at least one long romance, and several puzzling fragments, all woven no less subtly and poetically than the finest of his verse. Yet, before that time— and, to some lovers of his work, even now—his importance as an author rested chiefly on his verse. . . . It is difficult to believe that verse is permanently ceasing to be the natural vehicle for extended works of the poetic imagination. Yet Thomas Hardy, in an earlier generation, drove his poetry to the market of prose fiction and bartered it there until he could afford his triumphant return to Parnassus. Like Mr de la Mare, he has always been a poet at heart. But it is interesting (if a little idle) to speculate what English poetic literature lost as a result No doubt if

Shakespeare himself had lived in this century he too would have adapted the novel to his purposes, as, in his own day, he adapted the readiest means.— Enward Davison, in Critical Essays.