PEGASUS POET

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 719, 24 April 1953, Page 13

PEGASUS POET

STARVELING YEAR, by Mary Stanley; No. yd Zealand Poets Series. Pegasus Press, NE must comment again on the suitability of these small and cheaplypriced books of verse brought out so attractively by the Pegasus Press. The most recent of the New Zealand Poets series is this first book by Mary Stanley, whose verse will be familiar to readers of Poetry Yearbook and other publications. It is no discourtesy to say that Mary Stanley writes like a woman, and so has produced. poetry peculiarly her own, and though supported by a considerable intellectual scaffolding, by no means cerebral. Her themes are often domestic (a word much abused); but

the anxiety of a mother for her child, or the love of man and wife, are related to a wider context of human separateness, mortality, and Christian religious belief. It is a sign of this writer’s maturity that she often writes tenderly, but is never sentimental- > eeerk with $ by.every star, Orion, the Pleiades, two centaurs guarding the Cross, by all spells, by incantation, to aay 4 from harm my thief, my little dancer on the tightrope of time. And yet I know he will prick his finger, the spindle _ fall in the" well, the impenetrable hedge grow up * like a wall between him and his desire. Rarely does one have the luck to review a book in which each poem is

so plainly a real event. Mary Stanley’s style is sometimes over-compressed and convoluted; her images are drawn from many quarters, natural and mythological. But it is worth the labour to penetrate to the core of even her most difficult passages. At her best she is triumphantly simple, as in the verses beginning, "Husband, put down Spinoza, Pericles. . ." In this and similar pieces the poet’s achievement is complete; and the reader receives, as it were, a blood

transfusion, 4

James K.

Baxter