Misty Tower

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 823, 6 May 1955, Page 10

Misty Tower

MUCH enjoyed the first part of These Characters Remain, a programme on W. B. Yeats (1YC). Alistair Campbell’s perceptive, yet self-effaced review of Yeats’s letters made some excellent points about the man and the poet, and provoked interest in the book as well as renewing interest in the poetry. But Pat Wilson’s Staying at . Ballisodare, a poem on his search for Yeats’s tower in Ireland, rather took.the edge off my enjoyment. The reading aloud of a long poem often exposes weaknesses which are not apparent on the printed page. Despite William Austin’s impeccable reading, I found this lengthy piece hard to listen to, not. because it was too long, but because of what seemed to me to be a flaccid quality in the whole work. The piece appeared inflated beyond the sustaining power of the initial inspiration. I have | liked Mr. Wilson’s other poems, but here wordiness and lack of real poetic energy made me increasingly restless. Would Yeats himself, I wonder, have been so long-winded about anything, even his strange little myths? But by all means let us have more programmes like this,

in which New Zealand poetry is submitted to the searching test of being heard.