The Courts of Love

When William, Duke of Aquitane, butchered his mistresses and wrote poems of Courtly Love, a literary convention was being born which masked the violent tension between real and ideal in the relation of the sexes, yet drew its life from that unacknowledged source. In Mr Sinclair’s poetry sexual idealismpage 243 is a mainspring; but he lacks the ambiguous spirituality of the troubadour. Rather it can be said that simple desire, dressed up in party clothes, acts out the drama of Courtly Love; the result is a curious uncertainty of direction, at times a blend of sentimentality and vulgarity –

Give me the solid arches of your mind
That I may need
No priests to purchase exit from the mammal
In my heart,
Yield me the truths inherent in your sex . . .

It is unfair to Mr Sinclair that such verse should appear in a published volume. Perhaps one should blame the inscrutable processes of the Caxton Press which ensure a vast time-lag between published work and present labour. But though as a troubadour Mr Sinclair seems muffled by a heavy cold, in ‘Te Kaminara’ he has expressed admirably the unity of lovers with the natural world –

. . . alive and integrated in our arms
granting a little life from every kiss
to impregnate this rock, and know
our island virtues are all outside storms
and any death will knock in vain.

Here Mr Sinclair, if he raised his eyes, might see at the waves’ edge the fading footprints of Mr Fairburn, a poet whose voice also seems at times that of the lion among the jackals. The most coherent satisfying works in this collection are the longer, more objective poems rooted in time and place – ‘Ihumatao’, ‘Waitara’, ‘Te Kaminara’, and possibly ‘The Ballad of Halfmoon Bay’. The innocence of Natural Man, the sense of ritual enjoyment grips and persuades the mind. He has come nearer without strain to the Polynesian universe than any other poet in the country.

1955 (116)