A NEW ZEALAND POET
POEMS. By. J. R. Hervey, Caxton Press, Christchurch. QNE result of the Centennial Literary Competitions was to introduce the poetry of the Rev. J. R. Hervey to a wider public. His subsequent work has underlined the verdict of the judges who placed him first in the poetry section. He is in the first rank of our poets, and we have some good ones. His style is so much his own that his poems hardly require a signature. There is a gravity of tone about them, a preoccupation with sombre and _ tragic themes, and an austerity of outline, which proclaim the author, But that is not all. There are beauty and deep feeling in the austerity, fire in the snow as it were, and though he is much oecupied with death, it is significant that Mr, Hervey, in three of the poems in this new. volume, makes laughter man’s ultimate ally, "laughter that subjugates the threats of time." We find here the unusual point of view, the surprising twist to life, as in the poems about the funeral, where it is the dead man who _goes free, and not’ the mourners striding
away. Some of the occasional poems are striking successes in a particularly difficult field. The 23 lines about the year 1942 illustrate the power of verse to tell us much in little. Many of Mr. Hervey’s lines and phrases are memarable for their grave felicity or power: "the leaden, utterance of waves"; larks making a "dreaming roof with song": the rainbow "throwing flame on the whirled offensive" of the storm; snowcovered hills "bleak from the conspiritorial midnight"; "the lonely song falls like a shattered gull." Like some other poets, Mr. Hervey is inclined to pack too much imagery into a small space, and he should heed the old advice to simplify, simplify. A phrase like "in the pomp of passing synopsis" is overscholarly: it pulls the reader up with a jerk. But he has force, beauty, and intellectual content. "New Poems" is published in the worthy kind -of format we associate with the publishers, the Caxton
Press.
A.E.
M.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19430723.2.18.1
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 213, 23 July 1943, Page 7
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354A NEW ZEALAND POET New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 213, 23 July 1943, Page 7
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