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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

The Quality of Boldness

The Quality of Boldness

It is difficult to say exactly what sets a poet in the first rank of his generation or decade. It cannot entirely be gained by trying; or by brains alone; or heart alone. The capacity to bring the whole of one’s mind to bear upon some real part of one’s experience would come pretty near to it – this augmented by style, which is far more a quality of mind than a habit of technique. It seems to me that Alexander Craig, an Australian poet not previously more fecund or able than others, has begun to write not just poems, but poems of our time from which meaning exudes, like sweat from the pores of the skin –

Like Adam and Eve, across the world they come
Trailing slow feet so near a paradise
That fear makes distant, haunted by God’s spies
Yet still as far from Moscow as from Rome.

Over raincold rocks is blown the wintry
Wind, like a sibyl, with its voice that cries
‘This is the terrain your fathers mined with lies . . .
You cannot credit now that fabulous country,

‘See, from their daylong hibernation fall
Your white, cold stars – all cosmic glitter gone –
Turned now to pebbles that you walk upon:
These are the lights that held the world in thrall!’

– It is like the wind that makes the windows shake
Of each suburban home, each homing train
Or tram (it blew before men first began
To formulate the words we make it speak) . . .

I quote the beginning of ‘Lovers in Winter’; and it is hard to draw back from quoting the whole poem, since part of the excellence of Mr Craig’s verse is a strength of total structure – thought, feeling, image, combined in eachpage 864 poem to make a unique argument. I do not like Mr Craig’s verse. No one could like verse that reflects so accurately the subjective deserts of modern industrial society. But it makes me rejoice, which is a rare thing; because this Australian poet has come to understand those deserts and give them a voice. One recognises the careful logic and subdued imagery acquired from his countrymen and contemporaries, but the quality of boldness is new.

1964 (328)