From Ian Wedde

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32886, 8 April 1972, Page 10

From Ian Wedde

Homage to Matisse. By lan Wedde. Amphedesma Press.

lan Wedde is this year’s Bums Fellow at Otago University. Still in his mid-twenties, he is easily the youngest writer to have gained the Fellowship, and he is also probably the. only incumbent whom one could, in any meaningful way, describe as “avant-garde." The selection of such a young writer must, one feels, have a salutary effect on our literature: as long as Wedde is holding the Fellowship, he is making those young writers who parade themselves as victims of an unsympathetic literary "establishment” look rather silly. This, combined with the fact that Wedde is doing this year’s YC Poetry programme, should be conducive to a stronger sense of unity among New Zealand writers. For his first publication in book form, Wedde has wisely chosen a single, eleven-part sequence which explores the relationship between the poet and his concept of Matisse, an artist with whom he has an obvious bond of sympathy. This restraint is fortunate, because Wedde’s most impressive quality as a writer is his sheer versatility: his future, one feels, could go in almost any direction, and a representative selection of his work published in periodicals would probably seem rather heterogeneous. The self-imposed discipline of the sequence displays qualities of extended stylistic cohesion that Wedde has probably not demonstrated on such a scale before, and also, more important, it reveals a very keen sense of tempo: after a relatively vigorous, encomiastic beginning, the sequence gradually relaxes and eventually arrives at a gentle, human resolution. This is obviously the work of a fairly mature talent: the slightest tendency towards over-writing would have been fatal to the sequence’s conclusion, and Wedde, with a restraint unusual in young writers, has introduced his stronger phrases sparingly, and with full regard for the requirements of such a structure.