Three New Zealand Poets

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29994, 1 December 1962, Page 3

Three New Zealand Poets

[Reviewed bu

R.G.F.]

incvnutu vjp **•«•* Dawns and Trumpets. Stuart Slater. Pegasus, 1962. 63 pp. The Turning Wheel. Ruth Dallas. Caxton. 1962. 34 PPA Small Room with Large Windows. Selected Poems. Allen Curnow. Oxford University Press, 1962. M PP-

We do not need to notice the publishers’ remarks to realise that Stuart Slater is an intellectual jack of all trades; to read the poems is to wonder if poetry is not one of them. He is interested in “literature, philosophy, mathematics and science; music . . . fencing and chess:” his subjects in this volume range from “Playing the Franck Sonata” to “NDimensional Geometry," from landscape reveries to sexual encounters, from “A Memory of Martial” to “the curious history of carbon” (otherwise known as life). There are variously suggestive epigraphs from Homer, Ezra Pound. Paul Hindemith, and Olivares Figueroa; also a line of mathematics. Sometimes the containing form is expertly devised, and the experience or thought or mood is captured without losing its power to simulate; just as often the author goes the way of the modern ■'metaphysical” and achieves only the irrelevance of confessional writing: there is a lack of evocative precision. He is not at his best when he depends on a regional or anecdotal reference; but there is throughout a lively sense of literary adventure, and we can hope that the dawns and trumpets being "sown,” according to Figueroa’s poem, will strike and bear well in the next season.

Ruth Dallas in her second volume (the first was “Country Road and Other Poems.” 1953) writes a vibrant style which is at once charming and intense. She excels in verbal pictures, which are however not noticeable only for their own sake; they often take on the air of the traditionally pastoral. but never cease to be at the same time somehow tragic. It is the marriage of different, sometimes unexpected qualities, which lends these poems

a quite distinct flavour. The author is able to combine for example the incantation and the epigram to beautiful effect; and throughout the collection there is that nice balance of poetic poise and personal vigour which is the essence of good lyric. When the lyrical skill is applied to the immediate instance or problem, and when this modulates unanxiously into the broadest possible issues without either doctrinaire or technical strain, we have poems that are altogether memorable. One is at a loss whether to prefer the “Letter to a Chinese Poet” (a sequence now published complete for the first time), “Six Songs.” “The Turning Wheel” (seven poems*, or the verse-letter “Singing in the Back-yard.” Allen Curnow is widely known in this country and beyond as poet, as editor, and as literary and social critic. His reputation as a poet has grown steadily since 1933 when he published "Valley of Decision;” his last volume was “Poems 1949-57” five years ago. The publication overseas of a selection of fifty-one poems is therefore an event of less interest to the literary critic than to the literary historian; there is perhaps some irony in this fact, if it is true, for the literary history of this country has been one of Curnow's own abiding preoccupations, both as a critic and as a poet. The response will of course be cool in some parts, as is fashionable in the case of elder statesmen; there will be some to quarrel with the quarrellers; and from both quarters there will be some to quibble with the editing. As selections go, this one is a good representative offering of Curnow’s poetry, taken from the four volumes which he has published since 1941, but including “An Opressive Climate . . .” which is dated. “New York, July 1961.” There is enough to demonstrate the persistent interests and developing styles of the poet who, when the chips are down, must be acknowledged not only as one of the most influential but also as one of the best of our literary practitioners. There is no reason to think that, in this quite elegant binding, he will be any less successful as a literary ambassador.