Enter Without Knocking, reviewed by Cathy Gordon. "Enter Without Knocking" is a retrospective edition of Denis Glover, whose work has been too long out of print. Some readers may miss his lighter verse and satire but as a survey of 30 years of poetic production this volume provides an opportunity to trace a style, muted and witty yet with a strange force of dramatic description, and to see the growth of a poet's themes.

The poet's human interests are found in a post-depression socialism which still lingers in too much New Zealand poetry and at a more perceptible level in controlled vignettes of human conduct. It is when these latter concerns are perfected in an essentially New Zealand setting that Glover's finest success is seen.

"Arawata Bill" and "Sings Harry" are Glover's best-known works and they remain some of his most important in their sympathy with what the ordinary man feels but is unable to express. These, and other poems of apparently purely New Zealand significance, are in fact the ones which most contain a wider insight united with gnomic phrasing, which is lacking when (the poet makes a more conscious effort to write outside what would appear to be a restricted idiom.

Denis Glover's handling of the New Zealand idiom is expert. Though this poet has sworn off the lyric which praises the pohutukawa and the tui:

"our very noble native trees, let others hymn as they may please ":

yet with the compass of his serious work before us, Glover's best writing is still found where the New Zealand scene is retained— the poems most universally acceptable are those written by a New Zealand poet. Unlike Curnow whose New Zealand seems to be an empty landscape of gorges and sea, Glover's poetic country is populated by the people we know, and his poetry concerns these people.

New Zealand Books In Print, Wellington. 1964. Price, Milburn, 86pp., Í0/-. Reviewed by H. B. Rennie.

To attempt a review of this nature is to attempt to match one's own knowledge of New Zealand books against the resources of the Associated Booksellers of New Zealand and the research of their compiler, J. E. Traue.

Unfortunately. Mr. Traue comes off second best. In fact, the Booksellers' Association would be well advised to describe any future publication as "Selected New Zealand Books In Print."

Certainly progress has been made. Certainly in this, the third edition, we have a better index and an attractive and durable cover. What we do not have is completeness.

The limits set in the Introduction are narrow enough, but even within them surprising gaps can be found by the casual browser.

In the field best known to this reviewer, paperback editions, Mr. Traue has failed to trace what a conversation with any really good bookseller should have revealed. This, too. when an entry into paperbacks is gained by only a handful of New Zealand writers. For such diverse books as Katherine Mansfield's "Bliss" and Alan Curnow's "New Zealand Verse," Penguin paperbacks arc the only source. The bookseller who seeks W. H. Oliver's "Story of New Zealand" will find the hardback volume, but not the paperback, listed.

On the local scene it is difficult to be so certain. New Zealand books have a distressing tendency to sell out before publication or linger unsold and grubby on bookshop shelves for years. The list is good for finding an occasional little-known publication. But when we have, with Mr, Traue's collaboration, repudiated gratis publications, school and parish histories, many Government publications, most maps, some school books, and all but a few annual statistical reports omitted . . . perhaps we may feel that we can do without the list as well.