The Banquet and Other Poems by Frances Fletcher

Brief Notices

Candle and Cross, by Elisabeth Scollard. The Mosher Press.

This is a book of mildly emotional poems in conven-

tional form dealing with religion, love, the seasons, etc.

The verse is well written, of its modest sort, showing some

delicacy of perception, and a sensible simplicity of expres-

sion. Since the author has been content to write, in an

idiom evidently natural to her thought, of "the soothing

music of the winds," and of the hills, "beautiful, calm, and

steadfast as God's love," and has nowhere attempted any-

thing more ambitious, one can hardly say that she has

failed.

The Banquet and Other Poems, by Frances Fletcher.

Dorrance & Co. |

Miss Fletcher's poetry is individual, and its faults are

individual. There is nothing smug and pat in her work.

Obviously, she refuses to achieve easy excellence in the

imitative and trivial. Awkwardness of thought and an

amateurish technique do not obscure the considerable

talent evinced by certain poems.

NEWS NOTES

A Californian correspondent, writing in regard to the new prize offered

by one of our guarantors, to be given to a poem "touching adequately,

whether in praise or dispraise, modern science or industry," wonders "if

your guarantor, and others interested in this subject, know The Poet in the

Desert, by Charles Erskine Scott Wood, with its sonorous psalms-

numbers XVI, XVII, XVIII-dealing wholly with modern industry;

with its Song of Cities (XXXIV) and the summing up in psalm XXXV.

This poem has been published some years, but has failed to become