A Poet’s Weaker Voice

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32370, 8 August 1970, Page 4

A Poet’s Weaker Voice

Come Rain Hail. By Hone Tuwhere. The Bibliography Room, University of Otago. 22 pp. The way the various Burns Fellows have passed their sojourn at Otago would make an interesting chapter in the annals of New Zealand literature; some of them described their experiences in “Landfall 87." Most Fellows appear to have produced a substantial quantity of work, some of them even venturing into criticism and theatre, but, like most of his output since “No Ordinary Sun,” Hone Tuwhare’s work produced in that year seems sparse. The 16 poems which constitute “Come Rain Hail" were all “written or revised” while he was at Otago: the title is a good one, and the cover is magnificent, but after the expectations raised by his first book a number of these poems are disappointing. “No Ordinary Sun” was variously praised for numerous particular virtues, but basically it was popular because Tuwhare’s work seemed to have an almost unique voice and vision behind it; he was not constricted by any accepted poetic mode, and he did not hesitate to use heavy rhetoric and artistic naivety which, isolated, seem very daring indeed. “Come Rain Hail” shows a considerable expansion in technique and a more calculated approach to construction, but this seriously endangers the individuality of the voice so carefully established in the first collection. They speak tn tight esoteric voices sounds like the start of a bad student poem, and develops into a long, lazy witticism quite unworthy of Tuwhare. The book begins well with some excellent nature poems in character with his earlier work, but they are followed by careless, flaccid anecdotes which languish for want of vigour of conception. A single piece in a newer style stands out; “Hotere” is addressed to the artist and deals with the cover design of this book. Hotere’s lines are termed appropriately, “a visual kind of starvation.” His cover is

a superb orange circle on a purple thought-base

and Tuwhare’s response: Like, I'm euchered man. I'm eclipsed One hopes this is not also true in a poetical sense.