Three New Zealand Poets

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30562, 3 October 1964, Page 4

Three New Zealand Poets

/Reviewed by P.A.S.] A Map of Morning. By Peter Hooper. Pegasus, 50 pp. Whether the Will is Free. By C.K. Stead. Paul’s Book Arcade, 67 pp. Ambulando. By Charles Brasch. Caxton, 51 pp. “A Map of Morning,” introduces a distinct new voice, and the landscape of the West Coast to New Zealand poetry. The range is small but the best of these forty lyrics are moving and evocative. Mr Hooper thinks in images and his most typical poems move from an abstract idea to the embodiment of the thought in imaginative language. His short poem “On Death,” for example, culminates in a striking image: The mammoth foot treads down, its march the tenderness of hands cannot impede nor tips that freeze on prayer nor eyes that lift devotion's ultimate unavailing Sift before the basalt aboriginal face. This replacement of thought by an emotional equivalent is more for Mr Hooper than a poetic technique, it is a way of existing: Forget the blur of years the intellectual substitute for living and taste again the rind-sharp edge cf morning The danger inherent in such an approach is that the poems tend to stand or fall on the quality of their images. Many of the less successful poems fail either because the poet is incapable of sustaining an image throughout a poem, or because the imagistic logic, which gives a poem its cohesion breaks down. This results in a confused impression. In the poem “Navigator,” for example, no precise sensation is communicated because the images lack a meaningful relation to one another. The imagery in these poems is drawn largely from nature; from trees, flowers, rocks, mountains, and the sea. At his best Mr Hooper shows he has acute powers of observation and a vivid imagination, but occasionally he veers towards the vaguely emotive and the conventionally poetic. Vaguely emotive language appears most frequently in those poems which lapse into sentimentality where the emotion seems assumed rather than genuinely felt This is seen at its worst in the final poem “Faraway” and in this passage from “In Anne Hathaway’s Cottage.” But here, on the courting settle bit the inglenook. Shy country lad before her parents’ Vigilance, he held Anne’s fingers in hie ou n and watching the firelight on her burniehed hair, hinted at fairies in the Warwick woods or plucked her pippin* in the orchard, talking of dreams and London and their lore. The poems set on the Coast

are on the whole more successful than those set in England and Italy, largely because the landscape is evoked in more precise and concrete language. “Rain in Perugia,” and to a lesser extent “Galapagos Islands," though, impress with their finely realised descriptions. The most original poems in the book are not purely descriptive but express an emotion or an idea through images drawn from nature, as in “Sundown,” “Thoughts in a Green Time of a Former Sun,” and "Walking in Summer Wind.” This last contains an overt statement of the poet’s romantic confidence in the beneficence of the natural world.

Mr Hooper’s landscape is a sparsely populated one. He is capable of writing a successful love poem as in “Of Time and Leaves.” and in other poems displays compassion and tenderness for an individual (in “Pain”) and for mankind (in “Farnborough 1961”) but usually the poet is alone in the landscape, and occasionally solitude turns to isolation and loneliness as in “Written in Dejection” or in the strangely moving conclusion to “Coast Road.” This poem is one of the few in the book that adheres to a formal rhyme scheme. Most of the poems are written in free verse and are held together by rhythms and extended Images. This style seems to come more easily to Mr Hooper who seems cramped by a more formal technique. Although only a few of its poems are completely successful “A Map of Morning” introduces an interesting new talent

In his first collection, "Whether the Will is Free,” C. K. Stead has attained a far greater maturity than Mr Hooper. Dr. Stead’s first volume is in fact one of the most impressive books of poetry to appear in New Zealand for several years. Dr. Stead seems to have escaped poetic adolescence, for even his earliest poems display extraordinary control and assurance. For example "Trapped Rabbit,” the first poem in the volume, shows the economy of language, the precise and vivid observation, the technical skill and the avoidance of sentimentality which are Dr. Stead’s most characteristic virtues. This fine poem also indicates the poet’s unselfconscious familiarity with the New Zealand landscape. In “Dialogue on a Northern Shore” Dr. Stead obliquely reveals his independence from the concern with national identity that occupied New Zealand poets of an earlier generation. Dr. Stead evokes the local landscape, in the same way and for the same reason as he evokes the Australian landscape in later poems, not for its own sake, but as a method of conveying, by analogy or symbol, certain states of mind. In the sonnet “Dissolution,” the poem is in the mood created, but in his finest early poem, “Night Watch in the Tararuas,” the evocation of a mood is only the prelude to a profound and sombre I exploration of a spiritual

predicament. The barren moon-bathed mountain landscape becomes a symbol of spiritual barrenness reminiscent of parts of “The Wasteland.” Dr. Stead has written poems more ambitious technically than this, (“Pictures in a Gallery Undersea” is an obvious example), but it remains his fullest and most complex philosophic state-, ment.

After reading a poem of such depth and originality it is surprising to find Dr. Stead exercising his lyric gift and technical skill for their own sake. The impression given by such poems as “Three Imperatives in White,” and “Four Harmonics of Regret,” in spite of their skill, is that the poet has assumed a manner as a kind of five-finger exercise.

In looking for signs of development in Dr. Stead’s book one notices his gradual adoption of an ironic mask, which, in his most recent poems, is replaced by a more subjective statement. This ironic tone first appears in the wry observation of “Unexpected Meeting”— You smile, I nod ■ How strange a thing the mind. That leaves bad debts behind. Yet by it.. ■ pleasure that such is past Could find Each link renewed, the flabby bond tied fast. Almost all the poems in the second section are pervaded by the same ironic tone. The final stanza of “Autumn Letter” shows the poet’s precisely delineated voice: Over the rasp of grass a breezy knife Sharpens the morning, is by midday hot; Nostalgia’s tossed off with the bedclothes, life Moves in the usual dust of compromise. All roads lead to' (or allots) return: No Nero I, watching this Autumn burn. The irony is not always self directed; in “Three Poems in After thought” the poet moves one step further away from his subject matter and comments ironically on a human situation. The second section of this poem, “Now she owns golden Things,” with its richly ironic conclusion reminiscent of Robert Graves, shows a delicate insight into human behaviour. In Dr. Stead’s more recent poems the irony has been directed to more satiric purposes as in “In Kensington" and in parts of “Pictures in a Gallery Undersea," and his attitude towards human relationships seems more subjective, less guarded. This new tone is seen at its most successful in the flawless lyric “A Natural Grace,” with its quiet but moving conclusion:

All dag I’ve *at remembering your face. And watched the sallow stalks,

woven in curve* By a blind process, achieve a natural grace. and in the magnificent sequence “Of Two who have Separated,” consisting of two sonnets and a concluding lyric, which maintains a perfect balance between emotion and form. “Whether the will is Free” contains many fine poems but only in the last section does

Dr. Stead seem to have discovered his natural voice. Getting older. I grow more personal Like more, dislike more And more intensely than ever.

These opening lines from “Cry Mercy” indicate the shift in emphasis that has occurred in Charles Brasch’s fourth volume of poems “Ambulando.” The poet’s new mode of expression is intensely subjective, confessional.

This confessional tone pervades the two most ambitious poems in the book “In Your Presence” and “Bred in the Bone.” “In Your Presence” is a cycle of 28 songs divided into five sections. The poem is an exploration of a human relationship that is treated at times with such intensity that the tone becomes almost devotional. Love is seen as more than a simple physical and emotional union—it represents the fusion of Life, Death and God.

As is perhaps appropriate for a poem of such spiritual fervour, Dr. Brasch’s language tacks sensuousness but at its best, as in the songs beginning “I read your signature,” and “Skull on the sand,” it attains a kind of refined Intensity reminiscent of John Donne. The poem is cumulative. in effect and .builds up to an impression more powerful than the sum of its individual parts. Many of the songs lack the stature to stand on their own but all have their place in the total texture of the poem. “Bred in the Bone” Is religious in fact not only in effect. It is moving affirmation of agnostic belief. More discursive in style than “In Your Presence,” it attains at its best (as in the fourth section) the same kind of purified intensity. Most of the other poems in the book recall Mr Brasch’s earlier style. When the poet looks out into the world rather than into his own soul, his language becomes less abstract although it still remains elegant and refined. “Hawk over Bowen Peak” with its interesting cyclic movement is symbolic of man’s inability to attain spiritual perfection while earth is “waking in him.” “Mountain Lily” reveals Mr Brasch’s gift for delicate obsevation: Higher than birds climb from their marble forest The mountain lilg n-sts In shade among scrawled racks and snow-grass plumes. Where veins of .water tremble

down from snow By antlered heads tossing and snuffing at the wind's

Mr Brasch usually moves from the external events or object to a subjective interpretation as in “The Barley Field,” with its “old crooked woman" for whom “the field bears its. generation of song,” or “A Manila Folder” which the poet cannot bear to fling away because it “evokes the bringer” and has become a “silent judge of every torn affection.” Among the best poems in the book are those which deal with a human situation, such as “No Reparation,” or the intense dramatic lyric “Break and Go,” with its forceful and economical style. The same lucid and striking effect is achieved in the elegaic “By that Sea.”