Troubadour

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30212, 17 August 1963, Page 3

Troubadour

Troubadour. Literary Society of the University of Canterbury. 54 pp. From time to time the Literary Society of the University of Canterbury has issued a magazine in which more than one established writer has made his debut. For the practical encouragement which it offers and for the atmosphere of creative effort which it nourishes, such an enterprise is always to be welcomed and its initiators congratulated. The pity is that it is not an annual and traditional affair. The fact that, as in “Troubadour,” one can discover evidence of maladroitness and self-conscious effort is at once inevitable and beside the point; saving the possibility that a whole volume might be filled with irresponsible trash—which is inconceivable —such productions are in their ' very nature good things.

"Troubadour” includes four stories, which are certainly various—one fantasia which is more ar less out of control; one game which is more or less clever; one cliche which is more or less appropriate to the domestic magazine; and one experiment which is more or less derivative. The fantasia and the experiment are clearly superior, but one wishes that the imagination of the one were somehow combined with the technical confidence of the other. In this sense they provide a convenient measure of a general characteristic of the volume, namely the fact that a sense of personal experience, on which the readers’ involvement depends, has to compete with literary inexperience. An imperfect appreciation of what modes and techniques of communication will work seems to come between what is on the agenda in the writer’s mind and what is achieved on the printed page. With some .half-dozen exceptions the poetry tends to suffer in the same way; a firm grasp of the material is not always apparent because the expression is less than disciplined and tidy. Nevertheless. in the nature of the case, such criticism is perhaps too easy; it would be misleading not to record one’s pleasure in the variety and genuineness of most of the contributions, and in the lively sense of literary adventure whith is everywhere apparent. The “little magazine” may lack some of the glamour of the fashionable “slim volume,” but it is often more healthy and less idiosyncratic, and “Troubadour” is no exception.