KATHERINE MANSFIELD

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18599, 21 June 1930, Page 14 (Supplement)

KATHERINE MANSFIELD

LONDON CRITIC’S PRAISE. The literary supplement of “The Spectator has very appreciatory comments on “Poems by Katherine Mansfield, ’’ lately published by Messrs. Constable and Co.. Of the New Zealand lady the reviewer, Mr Richard Church, continues::— “Here is an artist, indeed, who deceives us by her apparent spontaneity. None the less gripped by life, none the less teased and lacerated by the unsleeping activity of her senses in their greed to absorb the universe, Katherine Mansfield had the wisdom of artistic maturity, and knew that power lies in restriction; that a sense of extravagance, variety, and force can be conveyed only through a rigid economy of material. Throughout her stories she made an axiom of this paradox, choosing her tiny field of action with such fatiguing care that she destroyed herself in the .search. “Thus, as in her story called ‘The Doll’s House,’ she was able to express ‘a world in a grain of sand.’ So it is in these apparently artless poems, seemingly cast together in a loose tumble of rhymes and broken measues. If you look closer, however, you will see the inspired marriage of verbal to emotional rhythms. Speaking of a certain god, she says:— When he stretched forth his hand A lake became a dark tremble. “A simple phrase, but what shuddering intensity lurks therein! That is | the sign of genius; the only justification for the weary misery of literary j labour.