FOUR NEW ZEALAND POETS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 110, 1 August 1941, Page 15

FOUR NEW ZEALAND POETS

RECENT POEMS by Allen Curnow, A. R. D. Fairburn, Denis Glover, and R. A. K. Mason. Caxton Press, Christchurch. HEREIN for 5/- you may read four New Zealand poets in a format of unobtrusive elegance which, I need hardly say, is a product of the Caxton Press, whose iron thumpings and wheezings have again clanged out a music measured and sprightly and nearly always spontaneous. These four poets have a common quality better in its time and place than spontaneity — maturity. They are aware of the world around them and of what it means. They are aware that they live in New Zealandperhaps at times too self-consciously aware, as in the glances at history in Curnow’s "The Unhistoric Story" and Glover’s " Captain Sinclair." (Why pick on him, Denis?). But this is amply redeemed by such wholly New Zealand voices as Fairburn’s gaunt and terrible "La Belle Dame Sans. Merci" and Glover’s "The Magpies" whose warbled "Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle" form a suitably sardonic chorus to the destruction of hopes in the carrying out of an all too familiar rural pattern. Glover has made a greater advance in his art than his companions. He has not suppressed his magnificent gift for epigram, and in this volume he has got something more out of it, something new and bigger. Moreover, he thinks in verse with a lucidity unusual in this age. Fairburn, the best-equipped poetically of the four, has done well, but he-with Curnow -brings out most strongly the one, still nascent, fault against which I would portentously warn them all, the didacticism apparent in such lines as these of Fairburn’s: Morality, custom, propriety, and the furious envy of the frustrated will be thorns in your feet, poison in your cup. That is too direct a statement (not to mention too unoriginal). It is preaching in verse: better let the attitude of mind speak for itself; let the blood creep out from under the door rather than confront us with the corpse. Mason makes the greatest use of the traditional themes of poetry-death and love-though in "Vengeance of Venus" the latter is inverted. Curnow has whetted our appetite for more in the selections from "Island and Time," a work in progress. He is best when he is simple: Sea go dark, go dark with wind, Feet go heavy, g0 heavy with sand. These poets have something to say and the guts to say it in their own fashion. More important, they make us creatively aware of ourselves, aware that being a New Zealander has in 1941 reality and meaning. These poems augur well: for "Book," the periodical the Caxton Press is to bring out this month, and add much to the debt we already owe to this courageous firm.

D.O.W.

H.