Struggling young authors are often advised to write about the world they know best - a good rule, but one that needs to be broken now and again. The Anglo-Scottish writer Robert Service gave us some of the classic poems of the Canadian gold rush, when his knowledge of mining was precisely nil.

He was a humble bank clerk who kept disappearing to wander the American west, ending up in the Yukon branch of his bank. Here he picked up a few odd impressions of the goldmining life, overheard from prospectors chatting in a local bar, and turned them into a narrative verse, The Shooting of Dan McGrew. This proved notably popular, and he quickly wrote the rest of the present volume, which earned him a fortune.

Much of it was clearly styled after Kipling, and sometimes dismissed as ‘doggerel’ in the same patronising spirit, which never bothered him, however. In ‘The Little Old Log Cabin’, he tries to switch into rough street-talk, as Kipling often did (causing critics to grumble “Why can’t he write in English?”), and the experiment is not a success. Some of the longer pieces also suffer from periodic ‘shoe horning’ of words to fit a rhythm or a rhyme, which Poet Laureate John Masefield sometimes felt obliged to do.

None of this detracts from the splendid muscularity of the verse, starting right away in the first poem ‘The Law of the Yukon’:

This is the law of the Yukon, and ever she makes it plain:
"Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane.”

That sets the tone for the brisk, masculine quick-march through life, which tends to characterise the collection as a whole. Attempts at sentimental effects do not really come off, except in one poem, the immortal ‘My Madonna’, just sixteen lines, and shining masterpiece of the book.

Two of the titles leave me unsure who copied whom. I had always thought the phrase ‘wage slave’ was coined by Kipling. And Jack London’s novel ‘The Call of the Wild’ appeared in the same year (1903) as this poem of the same name. But we know that ‘sourdough’ was the name for an experienced Yukon miner (accustomed to the bitter-tasting leavener that stopped the bread freezing), who needed to be distinguished from the rabble in the 1896 gold rush.