Australian Poets

The difference between these two books is the difference between self-fertilising verbalisms and poetry which reflects an actual world. It is strange that Hugh McCrae, with his satyrs, nymphs and Columbines dancing on moonlit lawns, should have acquired the reputation he has in Australia. Perhaps it had something to do with the personality of the man, apparently an agreeable one. His poems are all form with hardly a shred of actual content. The tradition which imprisoned him throughout a long life is the same which makes an echoing desert of the Alexander and Currie anthology of New Zealand poetry. One can hardly avoid considering such verses as the following in terms of mental pathology –

O jolly robin, flashing red
Through the cold garden . . . thou alone,
O blithesome children, not yet fled!
No narrow twig or rain-washt stone
But needs thy gentle foot to stay
A fairy’s heart-beat on the way . . .

Yet this kind of moronic babbling passed for poetry here too for several decades; and would still, if there were no one to laugh at it.

Kenneth Mackenzie, born in 1913 and drowned near Goulburn in 1955, must be an irreplaceable loss to Australian letters. After Hugh McCrae, reading his verse is like emerging from a stuffy room to an open street or beach –

These in the fish-pale plains of immaculate waters spreading your currents freed
of their banked course and
Silver, lace-thin over the shoals and shallows, remember
page 520 Our sources, yours and mine, in the chalice of distant mountains
Where from a monstrous nest of rocks you first came out.

Here he celebrates an Australian river; and in many vigorous love poems writes with something of the breadth and magnanimity of A.R.D. Fairburn. Though it is at times diffuse, the fundamental honesty of his work sets him high among Australian poets.

1962 (271)