ANOTHER BOOK OF VERSE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 5, 28 July 1939, Page 37

ANOTHER BOOK OF VERSE

THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE: And Other Poems. By Charles Brasch. Caxton Press, Christchurch. Emerson said once of Thoreau, or Thoreau of Emerson, that "his thyme and marjoram are not yet honey." Mr. Brasch’s thoughts and feelings are not yet poetry. Nor are they good prose: They who found and we who find Shore, mountain, dogged bush, What have any of us learned Of the place except its obvious look? Is it now as then the same Or changes with the relays of men, Different to father and son, An illusion its apparent patience? He can certainly do better than that: The dead in Spain, the tortured in Germany, The oppressed in India and the lost in England : Are victims of the one war, The war in our members, the war between our instincts, Between our cruelty and our pity, The blasphemous, the fratricidal war. O necessary this and the many wars From which man shall not cease; and necessary The enemy among us, the turned Brother we sucked with, necessary his hate And never to be overcome More than the ruinous and renewing winter. But he can also do worse: I embrace thee, darkness, My sleep is in thee, My waking fear, my weakness And the ending of the race. Thou holdest the weft, the fading Of this I am, O shapeless, all the shapes Of stars and men and day’s unfoldingThe shape of light Which has no foreshadowing yet, Cold im thy quick flint and patient stone And this anarchy of thought. Not that one complains any longer of obscurity in poets. But it is ground for complaint if their obscurity is wrapped in clumsy words and presented without magic. It is to be hoped all the same that the book will have a ready sale. Wherever Mr. Brasch stands as a craftsman,

he is thoughtful and sensitive, and feeds on the stuff of which poetry is made. He has had the good sense also to select an enthusiastic craftsman as printer.