A FIERCE RELATIONSHIP

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33941, 6 September 1975, Page 10

A FIERCE RELATIONSHIP

Arden’s Summer. Poems by Stephen Chan. Pegasus. 46 pp. N.Z. price $3.25. Stephen Chan’s collection of poems is, for a first book, unusual in its intention and coherence. It is a sequence of poems celebrating a brief but fierce relationship with the eponymous woman, who was met accidentally, and arbitrarily lost. There is a good deal to commend in this collection, and it is a notable advance on those of Mr Chan’s poems which have been previously published. Mr Chan relates the progress of the relationship to the changing patterns of different friendships, occupations, and cities. The relationship is not

distilled into a precious private reality but is always rooted among the casual progressions and interruptions of other concerns. People drift in and out, and the affair is given a natural context, a breathing space which defines and limits it.

Mr Chan employs a loose blank verse to accommodate a variety of description, evocation and argument, and in spite of some awkwardness with line-endings, manages it well. It allows him the discursive freedom of conversational recollection and, sometimes, the more ordered progression of argument. The poems speak with an honest directness, and this is an unusually strong first volume.