Gweilo: Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood by Martin Booth Doubleday, pounds 16.99, 342pp pounds 14.99 ( pounds 2.25 p&p) 0870 155 7222 ALTHOUGH Martin Booth was born in 1944, looking back he says "it was as if my memory...

THE FELICITOUS combination of form and funny that makes for a good cartoon is not easily come by. Drawing skill is hard to acquire; sense of humour easy to lose. Then there is the vital enchantment factor, a slippery fish (if it is a...

The poems [in The Knotting Sequence] are made up of short lines, reminiscent of haiku …, but the spirit is distinctly Western. A spare diction expresses the mythic consciousness of present-day poets on both sides of the Atlantic, the attempt to find in landscape and daily activities signs of communion with a past still alive and determinate of the present. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that poetry creates the past and brings to life the roots in the ground. The "Guide to the Metaphy...

[The Knotting Sequence is] rooted in a landscape: the hamlet of Knotting, where [Mr. Booth] lives. The first half of the book explores his feelings towards this landscape through the persona of the hamlet's Anglo-Saxon founder, Cnot…. Cnot is too shadowy a figure, and too limited in metaphor and suggestiveness, to be able to sustain a fairly long sequence with undiminished energy, with the result that some of the poems seem slight affairs; one, for example, is built around a weak pun: "...

[Martin Booth] is far too inclined to settle for easy answers, viz. his imitations of Crow, his intermittent sentimentality, and his rather easy recourse to the imagery of magic. He is one of those who hold the iatric view of poetry, that it exists to resolve the forces of the unconscious…. Booth's work is best when he focuses his style firmly onto the object in view, with certain personal ironies implicit underneath as in 'Whales off Sasketeewan' and 'Direption'. A...