CLOSE TO NATURE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 822, 29 April 1955, Page 13

CLOSE TO NATURE

THE LONELY FIRE, by Nan McDonald, Angus and Robertson, Australian price 15/-. "HERE are many critics of poetry who state or imply that poetry is a natural growth, the product of heart and mind working in unison upon their proper occasions-for example. the response of a child to the green enclosure of native bush, of a man or woman, after absence. to a beloved person. One need not ceny that first poems afte often of this kind; but it seems that symbolism, which is the life of full-grown poetry, occurs when the natural vision has been shattered by a second Fall, and the poet begins to try to piece the world together in a new synthesis, Then sense experience no longer dictates to the poet; it becomes the cloak of his or her inward and actual drama. These considerations may explain in part why Nan McDonald, a poet of considerable force, sensitivity and natural passion, has succeeded only rarely in any transmutation of her materialHere .are the grass-green slopes. the darkblue sea, Simple and vivid as a child would choose, And strung against them, red as the break ing earth ~ Along the cliff edge, the sleek shorthorns graze... The unpretentious record of impressions is effective on its own level, admirably true to life. But compare it with any poem by that equally unpretentious American, Robert Frost. For him, the apparently casual record is a cloak. The intricate spiritual drama finds expression in the image of the "frozen groundswell" of the earth under a stone wall dividing farm from farm For Nan McDonald, the record is the poem. The natura! world, in a suburban garden or on the Australian coast, confronts her as friend and enemy. the occasion to write a poem that ends by praising God. From her work, the most genuine and precise of its kind, one begins to divine the reasons why Australian poetry so infrequently rises above the level of its sentimental bailad origins. There is nothing more unnatural

than a great poem.

James K.

Baxter