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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University College, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 21, No. 3. April 1, 1958

New Worlds For Old, Louis Johnson (Capricorn Press, 10/-)

New Worlds For Old, Louis Johnson (Capricorn Press, 10/-).

Here is a mixed bag. Johnson has indeed the satirist's sophisticated, withdrawn, uninvolved, occasionally cynical vision of contemporary life, and his criticism is at its best timely and devastating. "Here Together Met", "Suburban Train", "The Way We Live Now", and many another are to be counted among the credits, but there are also a number of pieces whose worth is distinctly mediocre.

The total impact of the volume is unpleasant; perhaps that is a merit in a work of this kind, but the picture of a shatteringly contemptible society, unrelieved by any hope of salvation except perhaps in personal dedication to the search for meaning, is a tough one to stomach.

What Johnson says of the new world needs saying, and needs reading, too. But the statement would have been better without certain poems and with a little more good courage. I do not see the need to adopt the attitude appropriate to the belief that all we have are "fables" to help us to "hold something to cherish crouched by the guttering fire."

But for those who share impatience with mid-century urbanity, Johnson certainly has something to say.

—K.K.C.