Man of the Mountains

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 737, 28 August 1953, Page 12

Man of the Mountains

ARAWATA BILL, A SEQUENCE OF POEMS, by Denis Glover; the Pegasus Press, Christchurch; 12/6.

(Reviewed by

P.J.

W.

this sequence of poems about the life of a legendary West Coast prospector contains the best work Denis Glover has done, if only because he has found here and treated at length a theme admirably suited to his poetic temperament. His long interest in such a subject is apparent from a reading of "Ndt on Record," a five-line epitaph published 12 years ago in Recent Poems, which is practically Arawata. Bill’s story in microcesm. Bill is seen by the poet as a kind of folk hero, and is intended to personify, he says in a note on the jacket of tHis book, "all the unknown prospectors who essayed tough and wicked country that is not yet fully explored." Denis Glover's imagination is essentially a pictorial. one, and the first section contains magnificent images of the mountains, followed immediately by a portrait of astonishing vividness of the bearded old sundowner whose bright is little doubt that

eye will not forsake its vision of a lode in the hills, his heart "as big as his boots" as he heads over the tops "in blue dungarees and a sunset hat." So the poem continues through the episodes of Arawata’s story-‘"The Search," "A Prayer," "The River Crossing," "The Bush," "Soliloquies," and "The Crystallised Waves" with its characteristic lines: What are the mountains on high But the crystallised waves of the sea, And what is the white-topped wave But a mountain that liquidly weaves? Arawata Bill is more than anything else a folk poem, and its skilful technique is disguised in a simplicity of diction and directness of feeling, in the slangy syntax of a still primitive society. This folk qyality comes out in the ballad rhythms and lamenting tone of "Conversation Piece": But why are you leaving, Bill, When you've just fetched up? Stay for a bite and a sup Or a tew square meals . . Bill, what will you do , When you strike it? . . Buy a billycock hat and maybe Go on the bash. Obviously there is-something of Arawata Bill in all of us. He is the rebel of our society, one of the last of the ~

pioneers, the outcast, the noncomformist, and the seeker, This volume marks a new awareness of our frontier heritage, stripped of the romantic frills which spoilt similar poems by Domett, Reeves or Jessie Mackay in the Nineties. It is perhaps an unusual subject for the man who once satirised in The Arraignment of Paris those poets who wrote about the "dark and ferny bush" and "looked for Maori ghosts in Manners Street." But it indicates that his point of view has matured ‘and shows his deeper consciousness of his task as an interpreter of the New Zealand scene. Above all, this book speaks in the New Zealand idiom. These are rugged, lean and

laconic poems, and if he had written or" done nothing else Denis Glover’s place in New Zealand letters would now be indisputably assured.