SOUTHLAND POET
COUNTRY ROAD and Other Poems, by Ruth Dallas; Caxton Press, 15/-. ‘THE appearance of this first book of verse is a welcome addition to the growing bulk of creditable work produced in this country. Miss Dallas is an accomplished poet with a keen eye, a quick and ready sympathy and a fine ear. At her best She writes with a mature composure and fluency, keeping securely within the limits she has defined for herself;. at her worst she perpetrates the all too. familiar landscape poem with its appearance ‘of. having been written in the damp mood of sentimental reflection. Such work casts suspicion on the better landscapes and should never have been included. It’s a pity also that Miss Dallas finds it difficult to resist the merely pretty conceit or the facile metaphor: "Hands like fallen acorn-cups," women "shut within themselves like flowers in rain"-lapses which the exercise of a more rigorous self-criticism might have eradicated. Miss Dallas is happiest in poems like "Milking Before Dawn," "Farmyard" and "River-paddocks," all of which are completely realised. In such poems she reveals her real strength (and limitation) as an artist. Her verse in no way illuminates the character of a people as the blurb suggests; she is not even very much concerned with people except as part of an intensely experienced landscape in which everything is suspended in a sort of timeless nostalgia. What prevents the best of her verse from sagging is the. faithfulness of her vision which enables her to maintain a taut clear outline. : Here their midnight shadow lay, where sheep Aa straggling cattle tear dry grass, where ust Is white on gorse and broom, or rolls like smo In the wake of cars, betraying hidden roads. Such verse, which on the surface appears so easy to write, has its own special problems. To be successful it calls for something of the skill of an equilibrist. No word or image can be out of place. For where the thought progressés pictorially the intrusion of a single jarring note is often sufficient to upset the balance and wreck the poem beyond repair. Of the "straight" lyrics I like particularly the song "Her True Love Has a Second Wife" and the excellent "Elegy in Spring," which loses nothing by being compared with Housman (except for the faintly comical line "Plum as many springs and more’). In the quality of its printing, the book is weil up to the high standard we have come to expect from the Caxton Press, but so unfortunately is its price. To ask 15/for a thin book of verse (and a first book at that) is fair neither to the author nor to the public who may wish
to buy it.
Alistair
Campbell
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19540319.2.26.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 765, 19 March 1954, Page 13
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458SOUTHLAND POET New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 765, 19 March 1954, Page 13
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