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Poems of Exploration

THE FALLEN HOUSE, by James K. Baxter; The Caxton Press, Christchurch.

(Reviewed by

M.K.

J.

most accomplished of our poets, and one of the most various; in the past 12 months, he has appeared as poéte maudit, bush-balladeer and churchyardChristian moralist. Each role is carried off with skill and conviction, and serves a purpose; but Mr. Baxter, in all his variety, is a fundamentally serious poet. Although the poems in this volume share a general unity of feeling, they show his range of references and techMiques: he can quote appositely from Eliot, elegise the dead Hart Crane, write an excellent love sonnet in the mood of Donne, or salute, in Hardyesque verse, the memory of Thomas Hardy. He can turn lines which have the firm abstraction of Auden ("Fallen then the city of instinctive wisdom") or infuse them with the energy of Dylan ThomasWho now lies dumb, the black tongue dry And the eyes weighed with coins. He can also write quite simply, and movingly, in a poem like the "Elegy for An Unknown Soldier’So crown him with memorial bronze among The older dead, child of a mountainous island. Wings of a tarnished victory shadow him Who born of silence has burned back to silence. He seems most hhinaesit in a poem like this, or in considering the courtesy of young to old (in "To My Father") or the wild innocence of childhood (as in "Poem by the Clock Tower, Sumner’’) -in all things which reveal "traditional piety and gentleness." Most of these short poems spring from a single scene, or event, or recollection; and Mr. Baxter possesses the Wordsworthian gift of holding in the memory a commonplace experience-a firework display, raiding a _ wild-bees’ nest, or steaming into Lyttelton Har-bour-and contemplating it until it gives up his hidden meaning. This power to see into the object gives his images their precise but suggestive quality, as in- . the bald eroded summits Massaged unceasingly by the wind’s pliant fingers. . . the army blanket of grey earth Put Lazarus from the cave mouth stumbled. "And it accounts for his enviable gift of ending a poem strongly, with the everyday scene opening on a vision of the human heart as a ruinous mansion, or the bedroom door open for the Furies to enter. Like all good poems, these are poems of exploration; and like a good explorer, Mr. Baxter ends by bringing us news of discoveries. NM R. BAXTER is one of the

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Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19530515.2.23.1

Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 722, 15 May 1953, Page 12

Word count
Tapeke kupu
411

Poems of Exploration New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 722, 15 May 1953, Page 12

Poems of Exploration New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 722, 15 May 1953, Page 12

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