NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Walter Nash is a well-known supporter of Christian poetry and this collection brings together a substantial number of poems divided into two sections, one focusing on the Christian year and the other reflecting the human condition. I would have liked to have seen an introduction about his life. Perhaps its absence gives testimony to his modesty about his work. He was a professor and is now living in the Canary Islands. I have seen his published poems and I think this book offers something different — a kind of honesty — a truthfulness to the nature of faith; and the first half of the book, because of the arrangement of poems according to the Christian calendar, can be used in worship:

	Devotion's act is finished,
	uplifted sound has died;
	with yearning undiminished
	we turn aside
	from that imagined splendour
	to bear our common load
	of darkness, as we wander
	the usual road.

	In Your quiet house, at prayer,
	let me learn how to please
	with a submissive thrift
	of words well-tried.  And there
	confirm Your other gift:
	to listen.  On my knees.