LOTS OF POETRY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 311, 8 June 1945, Page 12

LOTS OF POETRY

HERO AND LEANDER. By Christopher Marlowe. Caxton Press, 4/6. LYRIC POEMS OF NEW ZEALAND, 19281942. Chosen by C. A. Marris. Harry H. Tombs Ltd. ; POEMS. By Clyde Carr. Progressive Publishing Society. SIGNS AND WONDERS. By Basil Dowling. Caxton Press, 6/-. BEYOND THE PALISADE. By James K. Baxter. Caxton Press, 6/-. THE WIND AND THE SAND. By Denis Glover. Caxtan Press, 7/6. POETRY: THE QUARTERLY OF AUSTRALASIAN VERSE. December, 1944. Edited by Hexmore Hudson. THREE ESSAYS ON CZECH POETS. By Frederick . Ost. Progressive Publishing Society. (Reviewed by J.C.B.) NE had almost said loads of poetry; and, indeed, when all this comes falling out of a parcel, some of it with rather a deadening sotind, one does (to quote Mr. Beerbohm) instinctively sit down, somewhat blasted. Slim volumes they all are; but what travail slim volumes can imply, both for reader and writer! And one hovers round the outside of the pile, temporising and uncertain. Shall one continue to be blasted, or shall one lift up one’s heart and listen to the multitudinous throstling of this nest of singing birds? Shall one, whatever the song, joyfully announce New Zealand a nest of singing birds indeed, or shall one rush to the telephone, ring up the damned Editor, and shout No, ‘no, a thousahd times NO! In the end one (one must get away from ths infernal first person singular-but can one?)-decides to take it easy, and read it all, but in regulated instalments, and ‘patiently see what one’s reactions are. I’m afraid I must plunge into the first person singular, I can’t give a final judgment, I can register only my own reactions. They may be alarmingly immature, wrong-headed, perverted; in~ fact I must confess that I never know where I am with poetry, I can’t define it, I love: meekly to fallow some good and accredited authority and to say the sound, the safé, the well-tried thing. How easy the prospect of writing a little book

on Milton, compared with the delicate, the embarrassing, the frightening problem of the mot juste for Mr. Marris’ brood, for the streaming inspiration of Mr. Carr, the less unrestricted issue of the Gloverian muse? : * * * ONE thing should be easy, anyhow; not much agony need go to Marlowe. Marlowe is a classic, even if, as Mr. Glover argues, Hero and Leander is neglected. I don’t think it’s "the finest love poem in the language" (advt.), but it’s a good poem in the lavish, extravagant Elizabethan fashion, . moving swiftly, in spite of all the renaissance decoration, chucking around the words with the joy of a child at a partywhat a party words were to those young gentlemen of the 1590’s! The Caxton

Press edition is a pleasant and interesting bit of printing, in hand-set Perpetua italic, and is cheap at the price. % * %* HE devil of it is, to turn from Marlowe to Mr. Marris’ Lyric Poems of New Zealand-85 of them. They are selected from the Best Poems series which Mr. Marris has edited and from one or two other sources. These writers are excited about words too, but the words are not trained and mastered; the stuff is "poetic,’. "romantic," secondhand, diffuse, "palpitant,’ "lavenderscented," semi-Irish, quasi-Gaelic, rhapsodical, mysterious, we get the "grey Waters of oblivion" and that sort of thing. "A universe has opened in my soul" announces one lady enthusiastically. Indeed, it seems to have opened in a good many of their souls; a fair proportion of them seem to have got into contact with God, there is a general air of expansiveness. It is not very much of an overstatement to say that almost any of the 90 pages of the book could have been written by almost any of the 38 contributors. A phrase here and there by Douglas Stewart has individual vividness, but how little individuality and vividness there is on the whole! The case.of Robin Hyde perhaps sums up the whole business. She was an interesting person, but her verse is, on the whole, most uninteresting; she must have written far too easily, she never disciplined herself, and the consequent slackness, the inability to be economical, the complete lack of tension, constantly nullify the promise that every now and again emerges from a line. She was talented. She wrote and wrote, she never reached a final statement. She is typical. Interestingly enough, what strikes mie as

the most successful piece of verse in the book Eve Langley’s "Native Born" js not New Zealand but Australian in its inspiration. * * HE other collection of verse by divers hands, the December number of Poetry, is more or less a_ periodical equivalent of Lyric Poems, but is Australian. It has one exhibition of mild wit, about a flea, by Robert CroslandMr. Crosland is evidently a student of the 17th century metaphysicals-and a good piece of colloquial observation in Clive Turnbull’s "These Old Men are Slow to Speak." Otherwise I’m afraid it is just worthy (in spots) and dull, #5 * % ME: CLYDE CARR is, like Robin Hyde, a typical figure, but a most unhappily typical one. I suspect that Mr. Carr is a more successful politician than a poet. He has plenty of good, honest emotion, a hearty democratic roar: "I'd rather be a rebel and dubbed a heretic Than a whining, wheedling sycophant, with someone’s boots to lick"’he runs to repetitious eloquence; he admires Christchurch and Auckland, and New Zealand ("Hail, our bountiful, bountiful land, New Zealand!"); like Mr. Marris’ lyricists, he is well in touch with God, he gets back to God with an almost Browning-esque inevitability, he is appallingly sentimental and completely uncritical of his own words-yes, there should be no obstacle to Mr. Carr’s reelection. Mind, I wouldn’t want to stop Mr. Carr from writing. I believe in freedom and rebellion and all that. But what on earth induced the P.P.S. to publish him, I simply can’t make out. * * * ANP so I come to Mr. Dowling, and Mr. Baxter, and Mr. Glover. You can invest in any of these without a nasty feeling of being had; and from each you can learn something about poetry in New Zealand. They’re individuals, they’re careful craftsman, respectful to their medium, they know the meaning of discipline and. deliberation, and concentration. They don’t deliberately splash in the local colour. Mr. Dowling, first of all: Mr. Dowling is a religious poet, but his religious verse is his least successful. He is a plain moralist, and more successful; best of all, perhaps, as a landscape artist of the Canterbury school, with sometimes a touch of humour and sinewy strength that the Canterbury landscape school is not notable for possessing. He doesn’t raise his voice; indeed he is so quiet that you may at first tend rather to ignore him; but mark his lark and his kingfisher and his quail (particularly his quail) mark his little phrases ("the

hyperbolic gale," "History camped-here awhile," ‘Sensitive, frail, memento-mori trees"); I see I have noted 14 or 15 of his poems for one good reason or another. Yes, ooking through the book again, I think he could have ditched most of his religious verse. But read "Quail" and "Kingfisher" and "Absolom to Samson" for a taste of his quality. Or this short, bare, traditional statement called "Mortal Love": How frail is mortal love With nought to oppose it: The ghost of a word or a whim Quite overthrows it. But see, when sorrow and pain Stand up to prove it, Not ‘they with their batteries Nor death, can mpve it. If you can do that sort of thing without being sentimental, you have at least something of what it takes. Or is it too simple, too traditional? I don’t think so. * Ba % UNDERSTAND that Mr. Baxter is a very young man, and a poetrylearned young man. Indeed he seems to have made a meal of English poetry, and speaks with all the assurance of a young Keats. Very often he gets away with it. He has an astonishing maturity -astonishing maturity that is as a writer of verse; his technique is quite unusual; he can do the second-hand literary tapestry and unicorn stuff with success; he can do other exercises that®are brilliant and beautiful ("Eagle," "Death of a Swan"); he is brave enough to use the second person singular ("Dost see?’’); he brings off his internal rhymes nicely. But he has the defects of his qualities. His mind roams all over the place, and finding a stimulus ‘everywhere, tends 50 to. overctowd his images that sometimes he becomes incoherent. He tends to have favourite images-clouds (baroqué clouds, uncontemplative clouds, rhetorical clouds), Beauty, Man, Spirit, the Southern Alps avalanches, tigers. I think lie’ll have to boil hard and scrape the scum off his jam. But it promises, so far as I can see, to be good jam. Time will show. This also shows (Mr. Baxter shoots a tabbit): 1 see the rifle raised, L see the jewel of sun a That over the muzzle blazed Move slowly up the gun.... There the scum has gone. % * * , Me. GLOVER. I have a great respect for Mr. Glover, for more than one reason, and his selection of ten years’ versé increases it. I am also delighted to find that Mr. Glover, whom I have always father feared as a _ singularly tough and hard-boiled guy, can write the most dreadful doggerel and not recognise it as such, I refer to his 12 lines entitled "Threnody." Curious to find that (p. 12) cheek by jowl with his "Captain Sinclair" (p. 13); it just proves that even the hard-boiled guys have hearts. Well, you can tiow see Mr. Glover's development laid out plain, from the days when he mopped up Auden atid Day Lewis and went in for left-wing .moralising; to the last four poems in this book, which are poems, and passionate with a good and controlled passion. Not that I want to run down the left-wing moralising. It was amotig the best of its kind that we got in the thirties, and it stands up pretty well to the passage of a decade. I shall be interested to see where Mr, Glover goes from here. He has tried most of the tricks, done the usual exercises, gone all

proletarian, spoken with a public voice, been witty and moderately profane, used his conceits -with discretion, been desctiptive, denunciatory, and _ ironical. Thank God, he has never left us in any doubt of his meaning, even if once or twice he has been all too obvious; thank God, he has generally been adult. And now, again, where will he go next. I'd rather like him to write his autobio-graphy-in his mature verse. Sometimes I have thought his mind a fundamentally prose one-a first-rate prose one, a very enviable mind indeed. But try "Sailor’s Leave," and see if you think so. I forbear quoting from Mr. Glover. Even if you haven’t read him before, you can safely plunge in without feeling the water with your toe.

Me: OST’S Three Essays on Czech Poets has a very nice cover, As we know nothing about Czech poets in this country these outline accounts of Jaroslav Vtchlicky, F. X. Salda and Peter Bezruc have their intetest-the interest of the subject matter. Beyond that I cannot conscientiously go. The English language is a difficult one to write, even for those born to it, and Mr. Ost, or the P.P.S., his publishers, would have been wise to have got someone to knock his prose into shape before it was printed. I’m sorry. * * * ELL, one has persevered. One has travailed. One has come out on the other side, Perhaps one can now feel less blasted.