TWO CHRISTCHURCH POETS

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32394, 5 September 1970, Page 4

TWO CHRISTCHURCH POETS

The Iron Bush. By J. E. Weir. Pegasus. 59 PPOnly A Bullet Will Stop Me Now. By Niel Wright. Pegasus. 48 pp. (Reviewed by H.D.McN.) The reader who is not in religious sympathy approaches the work of Roman Catholic poets prepared for certain barriers against full understanding, and perhaps expects literary novelty rather than poetry with which he can get involved on a basic level. One can admire the ecstasy of Claudel or feel envious approval .for the exultant penetration of a mystery in Hopkins, but it would seem to-require some kind of commitment to their fundamental religious stance before their poems copld communicate with the intensity with which they were conceived. One does not, however, experience this distancing effect with the poetry of Father Weir, and this is certainly not for lack of a pervasive sense of spiritual devotion. One might easily explain that Father Weir is writing in the wake of the confessional poets, whose direct selfexposure makes for an intimate mood, but this is only partly true. Like all lyric poetry, Father Weir’s is essentially egotistical, but unlike some other Roman Catholic writers he is not primarily concerned with exalting the ego or its experiences. The resulting austerity of expression and emotional economy make for simple poetry, direct, humble, cautious, and severely controlled; the poet is not on a, pedestal, he makes no pretensions of privileged experience necessarily superior to that of the reader, and the image of himself he offers is a plain man writing plain poetry. This is all much the same as in his first book, “The Sudden Sun,” but it is here stated with more confidence and consistency. At the same time, decorative elements of style seem to be employed more sparingly, with secondary metaphorical levels generally used only if they can develop with the poem: Once t l d have wreathed words carefully like flowers in the bowl of a poem, but 1 found, some time ago, that words seem to wither when freed from the mind’s soil. This is not to say that Father Weir’s poetry is intellectual, but just that, finely-worded as many of his poems are, they all have something to say and the poet is careful not to'allow style to distract from the meaning. This meaning, however, is never strained, nor is his tone in the general sense moralising. Inevitably, some of his work is implicitly evaluative, but this is not extended to the point of condemnation: his poems tend to be descriptive rather than assertive, sad rather than angry. Perhaps the most

interesting application of this method is in those poems in which an adult narrator describes childhood experience —childhood and maturity both retain their individual validity, the past and the present have a complementary dependence on each other. As one might expect after “The Sudden Sun,” much of the vitality of this new book comes f(om direct, stark images of the coast and the country, although here they are generally better integrated into the structure. There is still the occasional word which seems to jar inappropriately, and a few adjectives attract a disproportionate amount of attention. But questionable elements like these are rare, and are mostly absorbed in the branches of imagery which grop through a poem or suddenly materialise unexpectedly:

Night compel) the mind with images. I drown in darkness, stillness—the eel pond’s black water near Harvey’s mill.

Father Weir’s first book met with well-deserved praise, and the collection with which it began must have been one of the most impressive entries ever for the Macmillan Brown Prize. This second volume consolidates the achievement of the first one by establishing Father Weir’s poetic mode more firmly and by its greater confidence and diversity, demonstrating that this is not in any sense “occasional” poetry, but poetry as an expression of a complete response to life.

One expects young poets to go through a formative stage in which they experiment to test their ability at a variety of styles. Niel Wright’s formative period seems to have been extraordinarily long, and with generally disappointing results: with ten volumes (thirty “books”) of his “Epic,” “The Alexandrians,” behind him, his faculty for self-criticism has shown virtually no development. The ninth volume, “The Crocodile Dances,” was mostly of an inferior standard but contained a few redeeming pieces reminiscent of his most promising earlier work; the latest volume consists mainly of two long narratives, neither of which gives any indication of the limited but nevertheless distinct ability at this kind of poem which Mr Wright earlier showed. “The Sun Wheel, a verse novella,” takes up 20 pages with its clumsy, undistinguished, and uninteresting verses; also, its story and its tone seem out of character with most of the rest of the epic. Similarities with John Pudney’s narratives in “Spandrels" suggest themselves, but Wright’s diction is so awkward that he makes nothing of the colloquial style. The volume concludes with 14 pages of revisions of earlier poems.