SOME OF THE NEW POETS

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32234, 28 February 1970, Page 4

SOME OF THE NEW POETS

Jericho Road and Other Poems. By Mark Richards. 52 pp. The Crocodile Dances. By Niel Wright. Pegasus. 39 pp. Revenants. By Vincent O’Sullivan. Prometheus Books. 74 pp. The title-piece of Mr Richards’s book is a 12-page monologue of a commercial traveller not unlike Baxter’s celebrated “Henley Pub.” tn the course of his meditations he contemplates the various perils of alcoholism, materialism, and sex; he does say somewhat more than Baxter, but his loose, easy style verges on the overexplicit and his expression is fre--.fluently uneconomical. This is easy . poetry to read, rather like that of Christopher Logue, and many readers will find it preferable to the heavily ’“•Suggestive. over-implicit manner of Baxter, which has been unwittingly ridiculed by the poet himself in his 25-page explanation of the 50-line . “Henley Pub.” .i, ’ • Mr Richard’s shorter pieces vary considerably in quality, between epigrammatic statements which try to assume an immoderate significance and delicate lyries controlled by a sometimes exquisite caution. The two types are fused in the last poem, “Autumn ’69”—

J can imagine the first pterodactyl—he had a way he flew with the wind—

I know the lost—wheeling, searching all day above a frozen swamp on tired wings. Mr Richqrds is a poet with a wide range of poetic ability; this book is of considerably better quality than the average little paper-covered volume. In 1967, Vincent O’Sullivan won the Australian Farmer’s Poetry Prize with a sonnet sequence about Charles Meryon, the eccentric French etcher who participated in the attempted settlement at Akaroa. The sequence, which in a slightly revised form is reprinted in this volume, was reviewed on this pagfl at the time of the award, and, although the most substantial piece in the book, does not call for a second assessment. It is disappointing, though perhaps not surprising, that there is nothing really comparable in this new book: “The Long Harbour” was an extraordinarily accomplished work for

such a young poet, but its main success came through the adoption of an unusual persona which could not really be used again without debasement. Niel Wright also seems to be trying to extend his technical scope, but whereas his earlier books evinced his facility with long lines, “The Crocodile Dances” is dominated by fumbling attempts to write short lines. Mr Wright seems to have the notion that the shortening of verses is simply a matter of introducing a higher frequency of rhymes; in performing this, he demonstrates his ability as a rhymster, but devalues his poetry to the status of poorly-balanced jingles: But Ulysses Has No ease Among the seas, For lie sees Deal he before his eyes . . This particular poem continues in this manner for twelve pages. Towards the end of the volume there is some recovery. A 15-part sequence in a variation of his “In Babylon” stanza is skilfully written, and well controlled: this stanza-form is one of the most successful of Mr Wright's experiments. But the last four pages contain a disconcerting feature which has been common to several of the recent volumes: the revisions. These show clearly that Mr Wright works fast and publishes too hastily. Publishing poems which call for revision within a year is a disservice to himself and his readers. O’Sullivan’s new work, though, does consistently show one advance from the style of the sonnets: as an artist, Meryon reacted to his environment in a very sensitive manner, and many of the newer poems fuse the visual with the personal, especially at an erotic level. The title-piece illustrates this: Tail girls who step on gravel, their grey paths lengthy, the birds a kind of frozen ally, their foreheads wet from spray . . . they have crossed from Island to island. Thev have bartered talk. There are five other similar stanzas, all strongly visual in expression but with a dominant theme of personal contact.

Like the best work of Kevin Ireland, this kind of poetry is unashamedly intellectual in conception, and as such runs the constant risk of being overdone. O’Sullivan generally succeeds through economy of imagery, and though he usually needs more space than Ireland to explore a theme, he rarely diverges from a well-defined subject-area. Though relatively long, the poem quoted has a remarkably small number of components (girls, trees, paths, birds); the various statements are achieved through rearrangement, and the development of ideas is a deepening rather than widening process. The thoroughness that he gives this method makes most of his poems assertions rather than suggestions (Ireland’s usual mode), and the reader is left with a clearly-stated proposition to accept or reject. This sounds as if the poet pretends to know all the answers. He does—but then'he doesn’t ask a great variety of questions. Going through his love poetry, one is constantly presented with similar objects, simple visual ideas like the sky, trees, birds, and straightforward tactile concepts coming from gravel, ice, water, the sun, and other such general areas, it is tempting to find in this a response to Mr O’Sullivan's sojourn in Greece, especially when a specifically "Greek” poem like “Korinthos" incorporates these items into a general statement: All that lives is hidden water. A hacked cistern, the lie of stones—trefoil shrine of the sacred shrine. This is O’Sullivan's "world picture,” the place in which he rfioves, making superficial contact with simple objects (like women, whose hair is either mis-ty or smoky). The confidence and consistency of this vision gives the book an unusual coherence for a collection of short pieces and each poem assumes a deceptive ease—one feels that O’Sullivan does not have to try very hard to produce such work. This to some extent belies the technical competence which, already obvious in “The Long Harbour,” never lapses in this book, the only conspicuous fault of which is in production: the review copy has pages misplaced, and Ralph Hotere’s cover design suffers from poor typography.