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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

N.Z. Poets Break through Culture Barrier

N.Z. Poets Break through Culture Barrier

I wrote a review but it was not the right one. Too many of the big names.

It is enough to say that Alistair Campbell has a sad precision and Marilyn Duckworth’s grief at the death of a child achieves the difficult detachment that good poems are made from. Perhaps I am growing soft-headed in old age.

But all the poems in this book seemed good to me. There is no rubbish and very little straining of language.

The poets get rid of their sweat, as one does after a sauna bath, and what one sees is the clean flesh of experience.

It is suitable that one magnificent poem should inhabit the pages of Louis Johnson’s New Zealand Poetry Yearbook mercifully resurrected under a new name by Frank McKay.

The poem is called ‘Le Bons Bay’ and it is Frank McKay’s own, isolating one of those rare moments of personal testament that poets receive and few poets have the courage to use well.

I used to think that Frank McKay had talent but lacked the bone-breaking courage a poet needs to trust fully in the truth of the humanist occasion; and I thought him further handicapped by the trade of teaching, which surrounds a man with bogus intellectual wadding, and the vocation of a Catholic priest, which can, if he lets it, make a man the tool of many masters, or the servant of one who seems only to desire his emotional asphyxiation.

I take it all back and bow the head. Honesty is compatible with anything, it honestly comes first.

page 543

Honesty turns priests into poets, because an honest priest is, and knows he is, a man like you or me. It has done the same for John Weir. But I am not writing about him.

The three poems by John Summers are the best of his that I have seen yet. He is usually a fluid writer, one for whom strong personal feeling is poetry (it is only half of poetry; the other half is luck and grind) – but these poems have the crystalline imagery throughout which usually surfaces in his verse sporadically.

I think Summers has been a neglected poet, and neglect has made him sore and driven him toward a private language.

Privacy of language then makes further neglect more likely. It is a vicious circle in which half the Georgians were caged. But Summers seems to be breaking out of it simply by writing well, beyond the disturbances of his late growth.

Rhys Pasley has a grim first-rate poem about a friend who died on his motorbike. Louis Johnson seems to have found his second wind. Dorothy Parkes observes that the demolition of a building is not unlike war.

Sam Hunt is the one who is like a tree breaking out in many flowers. A prolific poet, who seems to have the full luck of the game, and gives the impression that the world shown in his poems is the only one available to him.

There are other poems and other writers. And they add up to a peculiar final result.

Either New Zealand has ceased to be an art-killing country, or else our poets have broken through the antipodean culture barrier and are able simply to write well about the worlds they know.

Has the great ghost of Calvin died at last? Or am I soft-headed?

I am strongly inclined to state that this book is full of honest, good poems, displaying the emotional strength and intellectual detachment which one associates with adult thought and craftsmanship.

We must thank Frank McKay for his more than capable editorship. I hope he does not wait two years to make another selection.

1972? (699)