Literary Views and Reviews

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29384, 10 December 1960, Page 3

Literary Views and Reviews

The Penguin Anthology Of N.Z. Poetry

[Reviewed by

G.W.T.]

The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse. Introduced and edited by Allen Curnow. Penguin. 340 pp.

Our poets are perhaps better appreciated abroad than at home, since what New Zealander would dare write, as John Lehmann wrote, that Christchurch alone among English-speaking cities outside England and America in the 1930 s published poetry of more than local significance? This anthology, published in England with the wide appeal of a paperback, will be finally judged by the overseas market, but its value to us in New Zealand is no small part of its total value. It is a selective anthology representing in the main established good poets by samples large enough to do justice to them. It foregoes the prognosticatory selection of new poets who might be watched for by future anthologists. The youngest poet included, David Elworthy,

writes however, in a new way about the old-established theme of Canterbury’s rural gentry.

As a Canterbury man who has become an Aucklander, Allen Curnow is w’ell qualified to make this selection. The poetic centres when poetry came of age in New Zealand were Christchurch and Auckland, and though Wellington has gained on Christchurch since, Auckland has remained a centre of activity for poets of a new generation. Auckland, with its larger Polynesian population and its University Anthropology Department is also more aware than other centres of the Maori part of New Zealand life, a side which is appropriately acknowledged in this selection by a section of translated Maori poetry. Some of these translations are early ones by Richard Taylor published in 1855 but surprisingly modern in flavour: others are by Curnow and Roger Oppenheim. The long introduction includes a discussion of the Maori tradition and New Zealand verse and notes on the poems translated. Most of the introduction is a brief history of New Zealand verse which is really a chain of critical studies of its more successful practitioners. This has the English reader in mind but, again, we will benefit, too. Such an introduction to our own poets is very much needed. Every teacher of literature must admit to himself sometimes that New Zealand poetry is not immediately meaningful to much of the New Zealand public, and it is not only the ignorant who fail to get to know it. It seems to be bad form to draw attention to this. Writers in New Zealand regrettably (if understandably) think of the critic as a well-fed parasite living on the ill-paid writers. But good critics are quite as rare as good poets and the writer in a complex age. like the scientist and scholar, needs his interpreter to bring him

to the public he ultimately depends on. Curnow’s excellent survey which has the excuse of explaining our ways to the outsider thus happens to provide something we need very much ourselves, and this adventitious usefulness to teachers and readers should not be overlooked.

The introduction might stand as a sample of the best New Zealand prose, for there is such a thing. Its outspokenness in exposing the shabby and the sham is something we can claim as

typical of a few good New Zealand writers of prose; its clarity is a virtue of a writer who is also a poet used to using words economically; its occasional poet’s trick of verbal wit (e.g. “The thirties released—or tapped—a spring”) is, if a fault, a fault we rather enjoy. There is nothing perfunctory about such writing. It -uan® pcaj pue st tion and enjoyment. It does more than introduce; it establishes a mood of alert awareness which reinforces the impact of the poems.

It is surprising when we leaf through a concentrated collection of what is good in our poetry, how much of unquestionable worth New Zealand has produced. It is true that early poems of more than historical interest are difficult to find, as it took some time for the European population to come to terms with a new environment. A certain amount has to be taken for granted to make a tradition and this cannot happen immediately. Resisting any temptation to exaggerate the worth of what was written last century to find something to begin a tradition with, Curnow is resolutely honest about the flaws in such a writer as Pember Reeves. Tregear’s “Te Whetu Plains” with

its honest rejection of a New Zealand landscape is well worth preserving, but the real accent which becomes strong in later poems only begins with Arnold Wall and B. E. Baughan. Curnow does well to draw attention to B. E. Baughan’s “A Bush Section,” overlooked by critics until now. His praise of it is just and it is a poem that will speak for itself anyway. A poem or prose-poem by Katherine Mansfield is something of a discovery, too, at least for its literary historical interest, its anticipation of the • awareness which leads to the real power of R. A. K. Mason’s poetry.

It is with Mason that we cease wondering self-consciously whether all this is to be taken seriously. We have been roused by a poem like “On the Swag” before we notice how many regional words and expressions there are in it, words we might have thought could not be used in poetry except as a stunt. From then on there is a variety of kinds of poetry but whether it is the quiet rhythm of Charles Brasch, the felicitous local touches of Curnow, the ironical outdoor tones of Denis Glover, the subtle elegance of Charles Spear, or the adequately cruel satire of Baxter’s “A Rope for Harry Fat,” it is the sort of poetry we would want to have exhibited as our national achievement. The book is well furnished with indexes (of authors, titles and first lines) and notes on the poets. The notes on the poets are primarily biographical but occasionally critical (thus supplementing the introduction) and a list of the publications of each poet is included. We have waited soipe time for this long-announced anthology, but now it is here we have every reason to be pleased with it.