POETRY Allen Curnow’s New Verse

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28536, 15 March 1958, Page 3

POETRY Allen Curnow’s New Verse

[Reviewed, by W.H.0.) Poems 1949-57. By Allen Curnow. The Mermaid Press. 44 pp. Readers who admire Mr Curnow for the title poem and some of the sonnets in his volume “At Dead Low Water,” for the caustic and eloquent commentaries in his earlier poems, for the promise of his play “The Axe,” for his magisterial criticism and forthright editing, will find little to please them in this new book—a handful of poems only, and those the more occasional piecps. A reviewer of “At Dead Low Water” suggested that reading Mr Curnow was something like listening to distant chamber music: he meant, perhaps, that the snatches of melody one contrived to hear were splendid, but each phrase faded before it was fully apprehended. The same might well be said about the present volume. There are moments in the book when one remembers that one is in the presence of the most accomplished of the country's poets. Such moments are to be enjoyed in the first stanza of the opening poem “To Forget Self and All,” in the sonnet “Dunedin,” in the mementos ofCristobal and Curacao, in isolated passages from the “Elegy on my Father” and “Spectacular Blossom.” in the last two sections of

“A Small Room with Large Windows.” But there is little that satisfies over the whole length of a poem.

The defect that haunts this book is clearly psychological rather than technical. Mr Curnow, everybody knows, can write with the most accomplished clarity, if he so chooses. His verse has seldom been easy, for he has always preferred an oblique and sideways entry into his material, rather tha’n a direct head-on approach—he takes the reader by stealth rather than by storm. But now he seldom captures the reader at all, either by stealth or by storm. Throughout this book moments of clarity are embedded in passages where the poet seems to be • deliberately fending the reader away from his meaning. One. does not expect, in a poet of Mr Curnow’s nature, immediate and painless accessibility-; one expects to have to take very considerable pains, and, in the past one has been rewarded for the trouble. The rewards are still to be found in this volume, but in fragments rather than in complete poems. They are moments of joy hedged in, by annoyances. With one major exception, these difficulties do not arise from the usual cause, a failure of technique. They rather spring from a mastery of technique which any poet now writing in English might envy, coupled with a’ crippling diffidence, a reluctance to let the reader into the ■ writer’s confidence. His mastery has not been used to expand and clarify, but to contract and obscure that area of the poet’s mind revealed to the public eye by the very fact of publication. Read, for a case in point, “Spectacular Blossom.” Here everything is, on the surface, clear and orderly. Each detail is sharply and frugally etched —the houses about the sea, the blinding summer light, the flowering tree, fallen blossom, waves, wind, shells and twisted branches. But the point of it all and the sum of it all? The victims, indicated in a recurring refrain—who, other than the flowering trees, are they? To what, other than the brutal month of December, do they fall victim? One is reduced to mere guesswork. The superficial answers are clear enough, but they remain superficial. There is no clue to lead the reader from the symbol to its content, from the indicator to the in-

dicated. And there is none for the very simple reason that Mr Curnow has not chosen to give one. The longest poem in the book, “Evidences of Recent Flood,” v/hich, we are assured by the dustjacket, “must be considered a major achievement,” suffers acutely from all these faults, and also, uniquely for this book, from a failure of control.’ It is written in typographically broken lines, thus: Only one night the squall made a great show, thunderclaps fit to burst, migntily flapped linens and lightnings, heaven’s menagerie leapt loose upon decks ana the herd snarled below.

The device seems a rather strenuous method of indicating the position of the caesura, but, in the opening passages, to be given sufficient validity by an insistent alliterative pattern, reminiscent equally of Anglo-Saxon poetry, W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas. But this pattern is not sustained, and the broken lines become, before the poem is out, just another device to bemuse the reader. It well may be that Mr Curnow seeks to bemuse, but if he does, the act of publication becomes the ultimate of perversity. The eight years whose fruits are contained in this book are clearly for Mr Curnow years of uncomfortable readjustment. The earlier meditations upon island, ocean and time have been fulfilled in the unforgettable choruses from ‘The Axe.’ Since then he has taken a new road, but his feet are not yet fairly upon it. The guides he has chosen to lead him -into a new country, first Yeats, then Thomas and latterly Wallace Stevens have been oppressively compelling and

idiosyncratic. The imprints of the latter two are heavily marked on this book. It well may be that Mr Curnow will have to free himself from his new masters as completely as he freed him Self from his old pro-occupations before he can again speak, except brokenly, with his own true voice.