THE GREEN GARLAND
STRANGE RENDEZVOUS, by A. R. D. Fairburn; the Caxton Press, 17/6.
(Reviewed by
P.J.
W.
N his early poems A. R. D. Fairburn comes back again and again to the subject of romantic love, and in this collection, which includes Poems, 1929-41, alongside later work to comprise the bulk of his writing apart from Three Poems, it is the passionate, youthful Jove lyrics which stand out. But there is an interesting obverse to his rather conventional, romantic passion, Time is the most persistent image in this volume, "I sing Wild Love, the bitterest of Time’s fruits"; "Time sharpens his knife"; "I am a weary man... whose lust is chastened"; "the candles gutter and burn out." In the long "Disquisition on Death" he broods on "rotten flesh" and "the beggar’s scabs." He is afraid of "that old greybeard, that ragged seer who stalks in the gutters of my brain," and there is a sense of doom in poems like "The Encounter" or "To Daphnis and Chloe in the Park," where the young lover has become "a man defeated in his loins." This almost obsessional note, . the preoccupation with time and the in-
evitable end of physical joy, which contrasts so often with his simple delight in life’s pleasures, helps to explain the more familiar side his work typified in the outraged rebel of the social satires, or, as he himself writes, "the flesh-starved anarchist who walks in lone pride in the wilderness with bleeding feet." There is something of the Swiftian temperament in this book. In "To a Millionaire" he plays sardonic lip-service to the Popular Front with his dolphins " murmuring to the revolution Will you be long," and there is much similar bitterness in. the witty satires and epigrams such as "On an Intellectual" or "For the Gravestone of a Politician": We acked for bread, he gave us stones: may this cone press upon his bones! He i¢ perhaps our best verse satirist, but on the whole, the satirical passages in this volume are less moving than his broodings upon the great themes of love and death. His youthful lyrics have at times a remarkable tenderness and compassion in them, and like his personified Wild Love he "wears his green garland in the withering sun, lights the world’s blinding dark, and then is done." The green garland and the blinding dark are his true emblems: (.. Seo Oo "Sees Ad. 20S
they form the balance between which his imagination swings. And although in the later poems the blinding dark covers his vision of life’s beauty more and more, it does not destroy it. The essence of his statement is contained in the prophetic words: maid and man take what you can before the heart grows~cold the mind desperate and the body old.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 729, 3 July 1953, Page 12
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464THE GREEN GARLAND New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 729, 3 July 1953, Page 12
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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