Across the Tasman

One has become accustomed to the sound of brass bands and aboriginal stick- dances rolling over the Tasman, that is to say, the expression of those cults of ‘social realism’ and back-to-nature fantasy which have tended to smother in Australian literature the development of any original talent. Therefore, it is most refreshing to read verse as various and unpretentious as that contained in Mr Mackenzie’s selection.

Some familiar poets are represented – David Campbell, Robert D, Fitzgerald, Peter Hopegood, Val Vallius and Judith Wright. David Campbell may contend with John Manifold for the place of the best poet Australia has yet produced; but one feels that he and other familiar names (Judith Wright, for example) are here represented by their left-overs – a trifle tired, the gramophone left running in the same groove. Or perhaps familiarity makes one undiscerning.

The two best poems in the anthology, however, are atypical. The clear, unstrained traditional rhetoric of James McAuley in ‘Mating Swans’ by its unity forbids quotation. And in ‘Forebears’, a poem in six parts, Elizabeth Riddell does well the kind of thing that makes every ancestor-worshipper stumble, with a sophistication comparable with that of Edna St Vincent Millay:

. . . Who laid the hopfields wide and planted vines,
And built a house of stone, and sailed a boat,
And went to marriages and funerals,
And matched each other’s daughters with their sons,
And rode their horses by the willow-trees,
And seldom read a book or sang a song.

Some of Yeats’s hard resonance is here.

By his influence on David Campbell also, one would judge Yeats the best antidote to lushness in Australian verse. He provides a context of ideas for the antinomies of bush and sun or sun and rock, and perhaps the only possible method by which an intellectual poet can draw on Australia’s vigorous balladpage 115 tradition without falling into a ‘tough’ or sentimental pose.

There are several poems contributed by New Zealanders who have set foot on Australian soil, including one sensitive and forceful poem, ‘The Island in the River’, by W. Hart-Smith. One has the impression after reading this anthology that Australian verse may be just beginning to find its feet.

1952 (59)