Two Baxter collections

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33675, 26 October 1974, Page 10

Two Baxter collections

In Fires of No Return. By James K. Baxter. Oxford. 68 pp. The Labyrinth. By James K. Baxter. Oxford. 76 pp. (Reviewed by H. D. McN.) • .the remarkable progress of a' strong and by no means provincial talent. ..” was Roy Fuller’s reaction to “In Fires of No Return” when he reviewed it in the February 1959 “London Magazine.” “... a poetic autobiography which illustrates the gradual emergence of an authoritative literary talent...” is how J. E. Weir describes “The Labyrinth” in a brief introductory note. Both comments succinctly pinpoint the strengths of these collections. In fact, these two collections may be taken as complementary in almost every way. “In Fires of No CRIME The Mushroom Cave. By Robect Rosenbloom. Gollanz. 201 pp. The smuggling to the West of an anti-Soviet document from the Soviet Union is the subject of this crisply-written thriller. But the plot is much more complicated than that. It is laced with details of the machinations of the American and Soviet security services and no love is lost for either. The book aims at a bleakness and achieves some. There is a little bumpiness in transitions of thought, but this should be smoothed out in later books.

Return” was Baxter’s own selection of his best early work, a selection with which few have disagreed. ■‘The Labyrinth” is a collection of poems which have not previously appeared in book form, and, though it is dated 1944-72, it appears that all but three of its 59 poems date to the period after “In Fires of No Return.” In some ways, too, “The Labyrinth” shows a development of elements in the earlier book which have tended to be obscured because of a shift in Baxter’s poetic values, particularly during his tenure of the Burns Fellowship. Paradoxically, this development seems to substantiate the assessments of both Fuller and Weir. Reading “In Fires of No Return” makes a delightful rediscovery of some halfforgotten pieces — the title-poem, for example, seems in every way a major work, summing up the pre-occupations of the younger Baxter, anticipating much of the older Baxter, but expressing it all with a rhetorical elegance that he later tired of. “The Return” and “The Not-Yet-Made” are in the same class. In “The Labyrinth,” Fuller’s view of Baxter’s potential seems fulfilled more completely than in any of the later books, because of its emphasis on natural material. This, of course, was an almost instinctive propensity in Baxter: from the start, the world of his poetry was natural rather than social, and in all his work one

has to look very hard to find anything much that could be called a “love poem,” in the conventional sense. Most readers will probably find a few poems in “The Labyrinth” in which they concur with Baxter’s judgment not to collect. However, a surprisingly large amount of the book certainly does reach the level of his very best work: there are some fairly well-known Jerusalem poems (originally published in two groups in “Landfall”) which stand well above the standard of his three Jerusalem books, and a number of excellent Brighton and Dunedin poems from the early sixties. In these poems the poet seems to move back into the territory of his younger self, fusing the natural and the personal in his earlier manner, but with a more confident and original tightness. All the influences that Fuller and others detected seem to have been very satisfactorily assimilated here. Even in his Jerusalem volumes, Baxter was still taking “individual felicities” and over-wrapping them, probably to a greater degree than Fuller complained of in “In Fires of No Return.” However, there was no time in his mature period in which he was not also producing splendidly finished work; this is probably what Father Weir refers to as “the gradual emergence of an authoritative” talent, and “The Labyrinth” illustrates it very well indeed.