THE CONTEMPORARY MOOD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 953, 15 November 1957, Page 12

THE CONTEMPORARY MOOD

NEW WORLDS FOR OLD, by Louis Johnson; Capricorn Press, 10/-. OETS can be roughly divided into those who write too little and those who write too much, with a rarity like Pop. or Yeats somewhere in the middle. If we say that most of our younger New Zealand poets belong to the second group, it at least puts them in a company honourably headed by Wordsworth. Mr Johnson does not belong to the "too little" class, and his new volume, like its predecessors, is uneven. But if we ignore the misses, the hits are interesting, both in their subject matter and in the attitude towards it. In part, they represent the mood of the ’50sthat of the young man (in "The Way We Live Now") who. saysI don’t want to be a hero; I want to be left alone, And quietly become a zero On the cosmic telephone,

In a similar spirit, "For the Giants of My Generation" performs something of the same function as Donald Davie’s well-known "Remembering the Thirties." "Four Poems from the Strontium Age" reimagines a situation more familiar in science-fiction, and (despite a touch of Huxleyish frisson) on thé whole successfully. But the most interesting group is the one concerned with the world of sub-topia-small town or suburban street, golf-club or old people’s home, the land of hire purchase where ". . . the rent/ Mounts like the tide of leaves on the forest floors." It is not altogether a bad place either: it has toom for the vigorous passion of "Love the Dark Continent," as well as for the more sardonic view of sex in "Melons." Mr Johnson’s feeling.for it perhaps finds its best expression in "Here Together Met," a witty and moving poem which is, in a way, a hymn of praise to the street

in which we all live,

M.K.

J.