NEW ZEALAND POETRY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 25, 15 December 1939, Page 19

NEW ZEALAND POETRY

DAY AND NIGHT. By the author of TIME AND PLACE. Caxton Press, Christchurch. The author of "Time and Place," and therefore of "Day and Night," lives in Christchurch. Here are some extracts from a talk on her books broadcast from Station 3YA by J. H. E. Schroder: They are not only poems written in Canterbury; they are poems that spring out of Canterbury; they have to be. seen and felt against a Canterbury background of landscape, life, climate, and light; and it isn’t a small part of the response to them to recognise that they | are, according to the author’s sense and spirit, a response to our own intimate environment. To recognise that, with pleasure, and with pride, isn’t parochialism; it’s the essence of patriotism... which means cherishing the land you inherit. And that isn’t done without thought and emotion that strike and) attach themselves deeper than the sur faces and the obvious self-advertisement of places. The chief reason why New Zealand is still looking for the novel and the poem that will express it is because it is looking for the wrong sort of thing, and not looking for the right thing where it is. The wrong sort of thing is the sort of poem which sets out to make a description and a catalogue: "There you are, that’s New Zealand! Oh, how beautiful! Oh, how marvellous! Oh, how we love it!" There are poems like that: I can’t remember a good one. , . Why, then, don’t we look for the true poetry about New Zealand where we shall find it — not in self-conscious, rhetorical addresses to something dumped down heavily as the subject for an ode — but in the good poetry we have, of which New Zealand is not so much the subject as the source? We shall find New Zealand there, often in a line or two; like these, where you hear it:

And far-off nagging of dogs obeying trade-bound drover Very early afoot on some hill-winding road. This volume contains poems that are New Zealand; more exactly, are Canterbury. At the same time, they are much more, just as "The Scholar Gipsy" is much more than lovely glimpses of Oxford landscape. Are we so greedy that we won't be satisfied until a poem is New Zealand — or Canterbury --and nothing else? That’s parochial, and that’s stupid; and if that’s what we want, we shall have the rewards of parochial and stupid people: we shall set up our own stupid images in art, and the world will have a good laugh at them and at us. I hope to heaven the Centennial literary competitions don’t make the laugh @ historic one — "to resound for ages."