Poetry

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29892, 4 August 1962, Page 3

Poetry

[Reviewed by R.G.F.] Thistles and Roses. By lain Crichton Smith. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 56 pp. The subjects and the sentiments of the poems in this volume repeatedly suggest a Scottish heritage: in many of them the author looks to his home' in the Outer Hebrides His feeling for the landscape and life of those parts is made apparent in precise crystalline language, with scarcely ever a suggestion of the polished froth of a sentimentalist. Some of his poems appeared in Edwin Muir’s “New Poets, 1959"; as well as writing in English, Mr Smith is the author of broadcast plays and stories in Gaelic and has published a collection of stories and poems in the same language (“Burn is Aran").

As the title suggests, the driving force of these poems is a latent contrast between two attitudes to experience The roses in general are beauty in the created world, including art; they appear as conflicting with various ‘thorns of life:” to use Shelley's phrase. Not often can the author find a “paradigm of straining forces” which express conciliation and balance; he is more often content to dwell on the contrast, between, for example, “the poems that I make” and the works of his fcllow-commit-teemen in ' “Studies in Power”; there is similar material in “About That Mile.”

There is a persistent elegiac note, pastoral as in “Luss Village” or assuming the shape of a formal epitaph as in “For Angus MacLeod." In “Sunday Morning Walk,” it appears inversely as “a refusal to mourn.” At a different level there is a continual preoccupation with the kind of mentality which glories in harshness as a fact of life, as indeed a theological fact of life; with the Puritans "there was no curtain between them and fire.” Of course the very courageousness of such a conviction, we are reminded, may engender both harshness in human relations and a doctrinaire retreat from the rosy things of this world. The “rare courage” of the final i poem appears to be that! which is able to preserve a balance and embrace both points of view The retrospective “courage” of “The! Bore” and of “The First World War Generals" may be of similar quality The thistles are plainly Scotch ones as. apart from everything else. “John Knox" suggests: but the antinomian complexity of all that is roselike and thistle-like really amounts to something like the either/or of the sensual and the spiritual, of the aesthetic and the moral—and alternative on which the poem “Kierkegaard” is a commentary. The forty-eight pieces in this volume are mostly of regular stanzaic form, though one detects often an effort to disguise this fact. Those which excel as poetry are for the most part lyrical in quality, being in effect song (many of them sonnets! or depending on direct address to the reader or an assumed listener Many are at the same time what may be called “situation poems." and in the best, the pictorial element and the emotional essence which is the real subject are fused with tact and clarity. "Schoolgirl on Speech-day in the Open Air” is a good example. There is scarcely any verbal play, and reflective and descriptive passages alike have about them a kind of austere subtlety: images which spread out and reverberate in the imagination are relatively few—e.g. "you take your pen z and write a poem in the space which you fear / Could you do this if space were everywhere?” The poetry of lain Crichton Smith is a kind, that it is too easy to write badly, but the strength of both his vision and his language makes his work compelling reading.