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Book Reviews A WELSH NOVEL O Law i Law," Nofel gan T. Rowland Hughes, gyda darluniau gan Dewi Prys Thomas. Llundain Gwasg Gymraeg Foyle, 1943, 6/ Rowland Hughes is known to his countrymen as a Welsh poet of distinction, and as the author and producer of Welsh Radio programmes. In what now seem to be the generous pre-war days, when Wales had a measure of freedom and opportunity on the air, he established a radio tradition. A broadcast in Welsh was to be a Welsh broadcast, and not a matter of translation. At the seme time, his programmes in English brought him quickly into the first rank of radio authors and producers. A man needs to be more than something of a poet to master this gift of quickening the air: he must be able to keep his faith in the power of apparent indirectness, in the virtue of the poet's own word and movement, and above all in a strong sense of poetic form. Rowland Hughes comes to his first novel practised in the art of spoken narrative, disciplined in matters of form and structure, accustomed to discarding applied ornament and the elegant variation. Endowed also with a profound knowledge of his countrymen, with that total command of the scene which cannot be acquired except as a birthright. And above all, a poet. The result is, of course, that in 0 Law i Law we find something we have not had in a Welsh novel since Kate Roberts wrote "Traed mewn Cyffion an adult mind, skilled in the craft of writing, sensitive and observant, moving real men and women through the pages of a book. The plan of this novel is simple, and effective for its purpose of portraying a community. A man of forty, after the death of his widowed mother in a quarry village in North Wales, disposes of the furniture to friends and neighbours. A mangle, harmonium, kitchen table, crockery, books, a quarryman's tools-these are a few. Each of them becomes a point of departure for a journey into time past, liberating forgotten emotions, reviving memories of childhood and adolescence ?nd bringing into being the rich life of the village community. There is humour, tenderness and isdom, firm characterisation and natural speech. But to a Welshman, the virtue of this novel lies in its sincerity. His countrymen in their thousands have already passed their verdict upon Rowland Hughes's novel; it is part of our literary heritage. When it is translated, it will be something we can offer to Europe. WYN GRIFFITH. "Autobiography." Margiad Evans. Blackwell, 8/ Poems from the Greek Anthology," translated by Forrest Reid. Faber, 5/ Nature is all too often an unknown quantity meaning sometimes no more than the vulgar lyricism of the B.B.C. and the newspapers or of equally vulgar and rather more lyrical young men with cottage gardens. After these Miss Evans comes like gentle and genuine rain. The title is either subtle or a misnomer. Superficially, of course, anyone can recognise the sad introvert of The Wooden Doctor but giving the title the benefit of the doubt this nature diary is an autobiography in the sense that the earth's life is Miss Evans'. If this is the intention-and I think it is-we may surely (to extend a recent coining of Mr. Agate's) expect something magnoperative." Wordsworth, Miss Evans' Master, thought his Nature's Darlings worthy of the most studied and highly polished simplicity. Not so Miss Evans she has forgotten, perhaps deliberately, that writing itself is a form of artificiality. Her sincerity is too rare to classify the book as a nature journal pure and simple she lives in Nature (in the word's metaphysical sense) with the detachment of a Symbolist in art; but manner and matter are ill-matched and what could have been magnoperative limps along, lopsided and incongruous. There is distinction of thought with no corresponding distinction of expression