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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Impeccably Moderate

Impeccably Moderate

These four books, attractively published and printed by the same firm, ratify one’s previous impression of the present high standard of craftsmanship in Australian poetry. The hot, noisy poems of ten or fifteen years ago, bursting at the seams with strained metaphors, striped with white clay and ash from aboriginal campfires, have disappeared for good, it seems. The doctrine of mateship too is out of date. Almost without exception, these carefully worked verses exhibit a life that endures whatever happens and expects no apocalyptic revelations. It is the subdued language of the Atom Age. Respecting this development, I still regret that the poets have learnt so rapidly from the critics who advise them to set their sights high – because the results are so impeccably moderate. Not one of them is guilty of overestimating his or her gifts.

Apart from two autumnal poems by David Campbell, the 1962 anthology is unremarkable. I will quote one of these poems in its entirety –

The cruel girls we loved
Are over forty,
Their subtle daughters
Have stolen their beauty;
And with a blue stare
Of cool surprise
They mock their anxious mothers
With their mothers’ eyes.

As with Campbell, there is a casual, austere authority in the poems of Robert D. Fitzgerald. They deal chiefly with problems of perseverance in the face of time, ageing and death. They are all muscle. Douglas Stewart, on the other hand, is still inclined to produce too many set pieces. The best poem in Rutherford is not the title poem (who cares now who first split the atom?) but one excellent ballad in the tradition of the Aussie tall story, called ‘The Man from Adaminaby’.

Judith Wright’s verses exhibit well the beauty and cruelty of birds, though they do not say enough to carry the symbolic weight she has tried here andpage 611 there to give them. They may bring some fresh air to the schoolrooms, though.

1963 (294)