A paradoxical poet

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32566, 27 March 1971, Page 10

A paradoxical poet

Letters from Ephesus. By lain Lonle. Bibliography Room, University of Otago. Pages unnumbered. “Recreations” (Wai-te-ata Press, Wellington, 1967) was a remarkable first book. With its self-defensive title and sceptical dedication, it suggested an author almost embarrassed at the prospect of publication; yet the poems themselves, revealed an unusually accomplished technique along with a confident disregard for fashions of style. The single persistent fault was that the book seemed'to be-at the mercy of an uncertain and unpredictable mood: an intensely personal piece would incongruously intrude into a context of reserved descriptive writing. Book publication must concede some continuity to the reader, and it was the weakness of “Recreations” that it could only be read one page at a time. “Letters From Ephesus” is a much shorter book, and one soon discovers that it has been more successfully structured. There is greater variety in both tone and presentation than in the first book, but as a collection it develops easily, and common themes inter-relate almost into a coherent statement. The reader is allowed a sense of security because the poet consistently remains at a calculated distance; this is still personal poetry, but the poet seems to have come to some kind of understanding with his material and remains stoically master of his resources. This is not to imply that lain Lonie does not care about his poetic subjects-r-rather, this care depends less on emotional anguish than on a tortuous cerebral process. None of these poems are assertive, and most of them take the form of an

exploratory examination of a building and its wider environment. The style tends to be impressionistic and linear, so that none of the endings are formally conclusive: with a developing series of images, lain Lonie works through a subject and the reader is left finally just as he was at the start. There has been neither an arrest nor a conversion, and all that remains is an awareness of a unique passage through the subject area—very similar to the effect of the pre-war poems of George Seferis. Also reminiscent of early Seferis is lain Lonie’s sense of bewilderment at the instability of his environment: there seem to be no underlying constants,and there is even suspicion of sensory perception. The focus is sharply on the present, and tentative gropings into past and future result in humiliated retreat. And since there are no constant values, there can be no evaluation of the material. An exception to most of. this is the final piece, worth quoting because it seems to conceal an attitude shared by lain Lonie: “When Morgan/Was made an example/On Pinchgut they pitched/ The gallows/High.” This kind of expository statement is lain Lonie’s normal way of starting a poem, factual starkness preparatory to a wry dissolution of the atmosphere. lain Lonie is a paradoxical poet, a stoical lyricist, and there is no knowing what his next book will be like; but one may rest assured that, if it is a worthy successor to “Letters From Ephesus,” it will be meticulous in its conception, ingenious and fascinating in its development, and above all, eminently readable.