FROM A SUNBURNT LAND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 871, 13 April 1956, Page 13

FROM A SUNBURNT LAND

AUSTRALIAN POETRY, 1955, selected by James McAuley; Angus and _ Robertson, Australian price 10/6. THE BIRDSVILLE TRACK ard Other Poems, by Douglas Stewart; Angus and .Robertson, Australian price 15/-, gig: ld O often one picks up a book of Australian verse with misgivings. expect-

ing either a trite homily on life and art and the talking bones under the gumtree, or else "social verse’? as humourless as the laugh of the kookaburra. It is pleasant to be proved wrong. At least half the poems in this new selection are about real occasions; and the strident note of the boy or girl scout leader is almost entirely absent. Judith Wright, David Campbell, John Manifold-these veterans fight g strong rearguard action though traces of tiredness show. James McAuley, writing of New Guinea and the death of a Catholic bishop, justifies (continued on next page)

BOOKS (continued from previous page) his theme completely. Elizabeth Riddel, Rosemary Dobson, Nan McDonaldeach one moves out of lotus-land toward intellectual honesty. Australian poets seem to be returning also to a conservative use of form. But the strongest and loveliest poem, the war-boomerang tall as a man, is A. D. Hope’s "Chorale," a love-lyric. which knocks the high nut from the tree. It is very pleasant to be proved wrong. Douglas Stewart, represented in the year’s anthology by two of his softer poems, does not quite come clean in the first tWenty-six pages of his new book. Do birds, frogs, crabs, cicadas, foxes, orchids, wombats, magpies, gumtrees, moths, grasshoppers, really mean as much to him as the poems would like to say? The large pale statements of Elegy for an Airman have long ago hardened to exact rhetoric. His nursery rhyme technique explodes ideas into images. But the second half of the book, a sequence of poems about the Lake Eyre basin in Central Australia, takes us from nature study to the more Gilficult study of man. The best Australian | poems are generally poems of spiritual extremity-in David Campbell, this side of despair, in John Manifold, entering the eroded badlands beyond-and now Douglas Stewart also finds the gold that will-not buy water, under the man-eat-ing sun of Central Australia. Thus, as a Lutheran missionaryOld man, old man Convert the sun, He is stealing the lakes And the sheep and the wool And the roof and the wall: Strike down the sun At Koperamanna And Kilalpaninna. It could not have been written here. Douglas Stewart's maturity.is Australian in method and origin.

James K.

Baxter