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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Old and New

Old and New

Yearly anthologies are like harvests. Some years the crop is poor, and no labour by editors can remedy it; some years the grain will stand as high as one’s head. This new selection for 1957 is a good medium yield. Yet it leads one to question the value of yearly anthologies. The best poems in the book have almost all been written by old stagers – George Barker, Jack Clemo, C. Day Lewis, Richard Eberhart, G.S. Fraser, Roy Fuller, Edwin Muir, Vernon Watkins. The last-named poet is represented by a superb formal meditation on the Arthurian legends:

Though she died in Almesbury
White as any lily,
Laid beneath the darkest tree
Winter cannot sully,
All the colour she had wrought
Stayed in her possession.
Time stood still in Camelot
Till her last confession . . .

The anthology is indeed a fine selection of mature work. Yet any of these poets could, without loss, have saved their poems for their own next books. There is little or no new blood in England. Anthologies should be experimental. Their function is that of a catalyst, to combine new elements, and when those elements are lacking, anthologies should lapse into silence.

The Hawk in the Rain, a first collection of poems by a young Anglo- American, shows on every page a fiercely idiosyncratic energy:

Bloody Mary’s venomous flames can curb.
They can shrivel sinew and char bone
Of foot, ankle, knee, and thigh, and boil
Bowels, and drop his heart, a cinder down
And her soldiers can cry, as they hurl
Logs in the red rush: ‘This is her sermon.’

page 344

Mr Hughes’s poem, ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’, recalls the jolting violence of Browning. He gives us all we can hope for in a first volume – direct, slashing poems, in which every word carries its full weight. Even his failures expose an abundant vitality not yet fully crystallised in form. He is many miles from the old man’s mellow tiredness which so strangely encumbers the work of other young English poets. One hopes he will have the luck to remain free of it.

1958 (170)