NEW QUARTET

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 481, 10 September 1948, Page 19

NEW QUARTET

BLOW, WIND OF FRUITFULNESS, By James K. Baxter. Caxton Press. ' DISPUTED GROUNP. By Charles Brasch., Caxton Press, > SELECTED POEMS. By John Crowe Ransom, Eyre and Spottiswoode, POEMS 1920-1945. By Allen Tate. Eyre and Spottiswoode, OETS of New Zealand, poets of America, neither "need resent this juxtaposition, Baxter and Brasch are the second and third of the so-far admirable Caxton Poets series which delight

equally in form and content. Ransom and Tate offer selections from their recent verse. James Baxter has a depth of feeling for nature which varies between the calypticStill the great symbols stand, Th ‘he mountains and the ee re

and the merely gracefulthe bronze horses standing in a a: Bie. 038 field Lean on the wind and graze the hours away. His images are sometimes eccentric or awry--Sun clothe the naked shoulders like a gravewhich, amounts to bee abuse of surprise. Even The wild lost de of a mother’s love sounds well, but, if searehed, is a weak thing. But I like the Yeatsian echo in the laconic diction of High Country WeatherUpon the upland road Ride easy, stranger: Surrender to the sky Your heart of anger. \ His University Song testifies that Baxter can turn out the occasional or ‘public poem, He can also compass satire, though it is not his characteristic mood, and in Letter to Noel Ginn he is Byronic without discomfiting the reader. Perhaps because they are still reacting against the parade of golden kowhais and clamorous tuis in some New Zealand verse a few years ago, both Baxter end Brasch generally avoid the specific

and the identifiable New Zealand detail. Indeed in Baxter the chief reason for thinking he writes of a younger country than England is the emptiness of many of his poems of the precise and detailed; but the whole body of his work, in spite of this grandiose vagueness, speaks of a natural world whose mood is at once more austere and more generous than Europe. But a poem like The Bay is unequivocally local, and has maahy. fine lineshe carved cliffs and the great outcrying ens. 4 Charles wield a. more sweeping brush and the line he traces is more

sinuous and flowing than Baxter’s work, He has eloquence ‘rather than the pressed potency of Baxter, not a verbal felicity merely, but a more _ sophisticated and experienced handling of words. Occasionally the word is overdone, overwritten,

unassimilated --- "archetypal sway ; "the enfranchising hour." Usually it is both gracious and exact-launches are "cuffed by pert waves"; hearts are "narrow like alleys"; and ‘grasses fly "motionless pennants." Brasch’s title phrase appears in two poems, in In Memory of Robin Hyde (which I like but think I ought not to), and in the profound final poem. Brasch’s taste is better than, Baxter’s, but he has less certainty of purpose, less of self-ap-pointed, self-intoxicated divinity. Such lines as these on the expression on a child’s face who Has the air of one looking back by death set free, i Who sees the strangeness of life, and what things are trying to -be mark his maturity, his skill, and his strong interest in what can be described only as spiritual insight. ANY of Ransom’s poems are partially narrative, ballads with an ironic twist such as Captain Carpenter. He-has a certain wry wantonness half-way between a serious irony and a bedevilling humour.» He is a robust writer who (continued on next page)

BOOK REVIEWS (Cont'd.)

(continued from previous page) plants his poems with people rather than with emotions. He bursts with force and vigour and cannot write even A Survey of Literature without recourse to the most earthy of images. He is the most assured of these four poets, the most firmly. directed on his separate path. Here is the last stanza of a poem describing a girl reluctantly sending his dismissal to a loved, impossible manAway went the messenger’s bicycle, His serpent’s track went up the hill forever, And all the time she stood there hot as fever And cold as any icicle. Tate shares with Ransom the extrovert habit of writing without fear of the accepted, the recognisable, the often-re-peated legend. Literary allusions are numerous in his work, and this book ends with an ingenious translation of a late-Latin poem. Sometimes his choice of words iss uncomfortably learned, as in this allusion to three American contemporaries (one of them the Ransom reviewed here)ine. esas John Ransom, boasting hardy Entelechies yet botched in the head, lacking grace; Warren thirsty in Kentucky, his hair in the rain, asleep; None so unbaptised as Edmund Wilson the unwearied, That sly parody of the devil. But this passage shows, I hope, that flowers will be encountered as well as thorns. Tate has a gift: for liveliness, for graceful concessions to keep up the reader’s interest, which is not often found in poetry. Both these Americans show, while the New Zealanders in part assert the contrary, that a conscious art need not debilitate the genuineness of

feeling:

David

Hall