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31:3 Book Reviews Bonds shows, for example, how Paul uses speech in Sons and Lovers to prevent intimacy with Miriam. In an equally interesting argument, she shows how the language of the novel undercuts the nanator's judgments of Miriam, concluding that "the story the nanator undertakes to tell deconstmcts the belief in an unambiguous relation between language and tmth" (44). Of The Rainbow, Bonds points out the lack of dialogue, commenting on "the degree to which the novel sets verbal activity at nought" (53). Its resistance to the differential model of language comes through the women, Anna Brangwen and then Ursula. Acknowledging that most critical readings of The Rainbow accept an organic unity of the novel based on the work's rhythmic, natural pattern, Bonds nevertheless argues that such a pattern is limited and partial, giving preference to the male experience of the novel. Her focus on verbal repetition in Women in Love places her less at odds with standard readings of that work, but her analysis— concluding that "verbal and episodic repetition are the means by which the novel tests a differential model of the self (93)—is still provocative. Bonds maintains that "it is the dialogic of organic and differential metaphysics that generates the textual energy of Lawrence's masterpiece" (109). By focusing so rigorously on Lawrence's concern with language, Bonds has performed pioneering critical work. Nevertheless, there are problems. Her focus produces—as she acknowledges at the outset—a "selective blindness." She states forthrightly: "I am not so much interested in what characters' experiences mean as I am in the ontological and metalinguistic implications of the texts' language " (5). Such a focused purpose—regardless of its strengths—leads inevitably to another relatively nanowed study, one that suffers from its concentration on form almost as much as the Meyers collection suffers from its concentration on message. The work also suffers from one of the ironies of much contemporary criticism—that it seems impossible for critics to talk about language in language that is itself clear, simple, and direct. Bonds has accepted the turgid vocabulary of critics like Jacques Derrida who inform her work. Nevertheless, Bonds has written a valuable study of Lawrence's understanding of language, demonstrating that he is a more self-conscious, more sophisticated artist than we have appreciated heretofore. Her work makes a significant contribution to a new understanding of one of our most important twentiethcentury writers. Lydia Blanchard Southwest Texas State University POETRY OF WORLD WAR I Jon Silkin. Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War. New York and London: ARK Paperbacks, 1987. Paper $13.95 Except for the "Preface to the 1987 Edition" and minor revisions updating the Acknowledgments and Select Bibliography, this is an exact duplicate of Silkin's 358 31:3 Book Reviews 1972 study, complete with the pagination and typographical enors of the original . In addition to his introduction, which traces the nineteenth-century evolution of attitudes toward war which were important influences on Great War poets, and his conclusion, which addresses the ultimate significance of Great War poetry, Silkin discusses Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Rupert Brooke, Charles Hamilton Sorley, Edward Thomas, Edmund Blunden, Ivor Gumey, Siegfried Sassoon, Herbert Read, Richard Aldington, Ford Madox Ford, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, David Jones, and a few others at varying lengths. Some readers who first encounter Silkin's book at this late date wül reject Silkin's implicit assumption that the only war poetry that mattered came from trench poets (or, in the cases of Hardy and Kipling, from civilians that influenced soldier poets). Others will remark the absence of women war poets (even in a discussion of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decoram Est," Jessie Pope receives no mention). Still others might question the rather odd proportions of the book (only 17 pages for Edward Thomas, only 19 pages for three Imagist poets, but 66 pages for Isaac Rosenberg, many of which fail to address Rosenberg 's war poetry). Many will resent Silkin's political judgments of the poets' relative merits and agree with Samuel Hynes's 1981 assessment that, in Silkin's book, "the attitudes embodied in the liberal myth of war become standards of...

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