To The City. A Poem Sequence

Dust jacket complete, but price clipped.Red cloth with embossed gilt titling on spine. No ownership inscription. 27 pages clean and tight. From the Introduction. Mr. Billot is a soldier, and his poems are war poems ; not the easily achieved objective catalogues of military impedimenta that can so easily deceive the unwary, but an impassioned statement, uninfluenced as far as I can judge by any other poet, of his own spiritual reactions to a nightmare world state. It seems to me that he is moved in much the same way, though with a greater physical urgency, as was Hopkins. The words rush out, in their own organic rhythms ; the images war with each other unceasingly; until the last line brings a solution, and with it a new peace. And this is so often a Christian solution that I would hardly hesitate to call Mr. Billot a religious poet. And like most religious poets, he is sometimes strong meat; the wound must be exposed before the process of healing may begin. I would draw the reader's attention first to the flame imagery in these poems, and would venture my idea that the poems themselves seem to surge and flicker like flames. Next I would praise the majesty of language which this young poet can achieve in such lines as "We have lived in the shadow of the long grass, In the valley of crushed ferns ; Loving the smell of the damp earth And the stark white bones of the day." Naturally, because he is concerned so much with the heart, Mr. Billot makes his mistakes; and they are mainly slack rhythms and uncertain images. But I would sacrifice all technical brilliance for the sake of the tenderness and sincerity which I see in these lines. "We found the night mysterious With the suffering of tiny things." A poet may be an exquisite spinner of patterns, a weaver of sounds, but unless he has that sympathy with all living things under sun and moon, he is nothing more than a carpenter of words. And I believe Mr. Billot to be something more than that. Henry Treece. May 30th, 1942. Size: 5.75" By 7.5" Tall.…