A Clear Eye

If I understand the author’s intention correctly, the longest poem in this book, ‘Notes for a Biography’, is about the making of a demagogue. The critics who pay attention only to form, never to substance, may dismiss its laconic telegraphese; but I think it is the first considerable political poem published here since Fairburn’s ‘Dominion’. Mr Mitcalfe has an X-ray eye for those potential energies, those moments of imprisonment or liberation, which exist like winter bulbs under the iron-grey soil of our Puritan culture –

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Snubbed, but not for long, he manages to reconcile
A reputation for native wit and charm in the most exclusive clubs
With his position outside, representative of the mass
Who resent words as weapons not of their choosing . . .
His, the conventional escape from convention,
The outlaw becomes the law, the warped straight
And all things false . . .

These lines are by no means the strongest in the poem, but they do show Mr Mitcalfe’s grasp of that social process by which the ‘adjusted’ man betrays his own deeper self and his fellow-workers – the essential tragedy of socialism in this country.

In his sequence ‘The Parihaka Block’ Mr Mitcalfe attempts to describe another process, the seizure by force of Maori lands, under legal pretexts, illustrated by the brutal sacking of Parihaka and the barbarous imprisonment of Te Whiti. The argument of the last poem is bare and exact as a knife blade –

That each survivor might seek for himself
A small place in the pakeha world of want and wealth –

but the sequence as a whole does not quite hold together.

The ‘Country District’ sequence of six poems contains the best Mr Mitcalfe has to offer, a perfect marriage of rich substance and adequate form –

Tangle of rabbits at their roots
The island pine and the age-grey house
Breathe and sway the hollow blowing night away
And sigh the children off to sleep
Curled warm and faintly breathing
Brown bodies in the hollow of an eye . . .

I wish I had room to quote the whole poem, as good as any included in the recent Penguin anthology of New Zealand verse. Mr Mitcalfe has staying power and a clear eye. I look forward eagerly to the publication of his translations from the Maori.

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