Punctuation Helps
SEVEN SONNETS. By Kendrick Smithyman, The Pelorus Press, Auckland. HESE sonnets appeal more after several readings. Too much of that shock of beauty and truth which should be poetry’s chief purpose is lost at the first readings in intellectual struggle to punctuate, parse, and analyse. It is: no sin for a poet to punctuate, and deliberate obscurity is not a virtue, Mathematics are to exercise the intellectpoetry to satisfy the soul and senses, Numbers 5, 6, and 7 are the best of these sonnets, and contain some hauntingly beautiful lines. pe Bo gitl carries sorrow on her and all my world swings at her fingertips calls up a lovely image, as doesShe will sing through every ocean chapel of my being and bird be of my eye at waking morning, from the same sonnet. And what was sleeping comes out from its sleep stranger and diffident and learns to weep, has the simplicity and inevitability of all good poetry.
B.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 424, 8 August 1947, Page 12
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162Punctuation Helps New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 424, 8 August 1947, Page 12
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