THE BICYCLE CLUB

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 426, 22 August 1947, Page 16

THE BICYCLE CLUB

BOOK, No. 9. Caxton Press. PART of the charm of Book lies in its unexpected appearances. This short story number contains many new names. A. P. Gaskell (a name not quite so new) has a well worked out story. P, J. Wilson and Denis McEldowney play about with Maori tapu; I prefer the MaoriPakeha social encounter of James Forsyth. Donald Anderson, G. LeF. Young, and Dorothy White tell their tales straightforwardly, and Maurice Duggan is a pleasant parodist, P. J. Wilson (in his second story) and Bill Pearson seem to me to have told us most. In some of these stories there is a suggestion of a level of competence, a skilful success more damaging than failure. Perversely, and very ungratefully, I would feel haj pier if some of these stories were. really bad. Nobody really gets off his bike; for some there is hard pedalling to keep up with the club. The poets are Anton Vogt, who begins a good poem with a harsh and alien -metaphor, Louis Johnson, whose Leda bas a black swan, Basil Dowling, who in his three poems gives hints of W. H. . Davies and of the 17th Century, W. Jy~ McEldowney, who does not quite bring off a descriptive piece, James Baxter, whose dirge on a/ virgin echoes traditional pieties, Kendrick Smithyman, whose two sonnets are in an easily flowjing idiom, E, Badian, who translates Aragon well, and Walter Brookes, who does the same for Heine. In spite of an occasional puncture they get ahead of the mob and have the billy boiling by the time they arrive. The Caxton Pressers have had a lot of good, clean fun with some line blocks of Victorian or at least Edwardian vintage, but perhaps that bike has been ridden far enéugh?

David

Hall