‘The other real world’

Press, 17 April 1982, Page 16

‘The other real world’

Mystical Choice: 47 Poems by New Zealand Poets. Edited by Helen Shaw. Mandala Editions, 1981. $6.80. Ambitions of Clouds. By Helen Shaw. Nag's Head Press, 1981. 35 pp. $8.55. The Way Back. By Meg Campbell. Te Kotare Press, 1981. 48 pp. $6.95. (Reviewed by Peter Simpson

In an autobiographical essay published in “Islands 23” Helen Shaw located her beginnings as a writer in a consciousness dating from childhood of an alternative reality: "A child in a mirror of dreams, this was the beginning, the vapoury recognition of a second identity, another child I felt surely must be myself... who experienced a different world, the other real world.” Both her own poems and the selection she has made from other NewZealand poets focus on intimations of this other world which is felt to be more "real” than that of familiar reality: Vacant the earth of Man — high on mountainous line I sense the grasses shine. Helen Shaw is better known in New Zealand as a short story writer than as a poet (her selected stories, "The Gypsies,” was published in 1978), partly because her previous collections have been published in England and India. "Ambitions of Clouds,” though it contains only 16 poems, is the most substantial collection she has published here. The problem for the poet who apprehends another reality beyond the material is how to communicate the vision, how to articulate that which is beyond words. Hubert Witheford, prominently represented in "Mystical Choice,” expresses the problem in these terms: That though I speak, I know beyond my words Intolerably bright and silent fields Burning above me, that I may not name. Shaw's solution, and that of most of the poets in her collection, is the traditional technique of religious poetry — symbolism. The symbol, the object which derives from one order of reality, but which speaks for a reality beyond itself, allows the physical to evoke the metaphysical, the natural to evoke the supernatural, the sensory to evoke the extra-sensory. The operation of the symbolist imagination is explained in these terms by William Blake: “This World of Imagination is Infinite and Eternal, whereas the world of Generation, or Vegetation, is Finite and Temporal. There exist in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this Vegetable Glass of Nature.” Blake, in fact, seems to have inspired some of Shaw’s poems; “The Delayed Demands Pigeonholed” is Blakeian both in its imagery of speaking flowers and in its theme of aspirations unfulfilled through the curbing of natural desire: I see the lily on the page of my intentions rise up, open all eyes, • cry and taunt . . . Is that adolescent, in a yellow dress, speaking of aspirations the picture I denied? Self, projecting selves, Have I broken her ambitions oj clouds? As this example suggests the verse is sometimes gnomic and obscure, making unfamiliar demands on the reader’s powers of comprehension. The poet rather revels in her strangeness, presenting herself in one poem as a colourful, deciduous exotic in a forest of evergreen natives: “a woman with poems foreign as a tree from China.” Sometimes, though, Helen Shaw’s imagery seems precious, possessing a preRaphaelite prettiness and decorative charm, but belonging to the lesser world of “waking dreams” rather than “vision” Ito employ Keats’ distinction), or to the

realm of “fancy”’- rather than ‘imagination”’ (to employ Coleridge's): ‘Pale, greenfeathered ostrich/why do you wade/in a park of ocean, butterflies/in your hair?" Why,, indeed? - To a reader familiar with New Zealand poetry, Helen Shaw's . “Mystical Choice” reads" as oddly and unexpectedly as, one imagines, might an anthology of our verse selected by someone from China. In casting her net for poems which “by way of meditative or metaphysical or mystical themes, climb a little, now and then indicate territories that the dedicated mystics have explored,” she discards some familiar names (including some of our biggest fish), and gives prominence to what are usually considered lesser fry. Those represented by at least two poems are: Witheford. William HartSmith, Katherine Mansfield, Louis Johnson, Basil Dowling, John Summers. Alistair Campbell. Gloria Rawlinson, Ruth Dallas and Ursula Bethell. About 20 others are represented by a single poem. The unusual angle of perspective makes for . a refreshingly novel collection. It will especially interest those who share Helen Shaw’s mystical predilections, but those whose’ primary interest is in poetry will be fascinated by the variety of ways New Zealand poets have found for attempting to express the ineffable. Meg Campbell is not included in “Mystical Choice,” though several of her poems, by dint of theme and quality, would not be out of place here. The mystical, however, is just one of Meg Campbell’s concerns. More often and more memorable her poetry is rooted in this world, not that world, in particular in marriage, motherhood, memory and madness. If Helen Shaw’s poems are stained glass windows, their brightly coloured surfaces illuminated from a source which their effulgence thereby evokes, then Meg Campbell’s poems are clear panes oi glass, providing a surface of which the reader is almost unconscious, so firmly is his attention fixed on what is seen through the window. For example, the ending bi the fine poem about a marriage crisis, “Brown Peahen”: Nothing is resolved, but it's time to return wet and dreaming up the hill to put my case silently to your silent back, to breach the wall of your pretended indifference, and claim with footfall, half the. house and bed — half child, half-woman, half wishing to be dead. Only poetry which is extremely artful can create the illusion of seeming So artless. As Yeats said once: “A line will take us hours maybe;/Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,/Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.” Again and again, Meg Campbell’s poems strike one with the force of their honesty and truth, and with the directness and economy of their means. Born in 1937, married to the poet Alistair Campbell, and mother of four children, Meg Campbell began writing poems when she was 40, “much to her surprise": Now, at forty I have cut off my long hair and with it have cut off the children that clung to it. It is suddenly sink or swim time and I swim best alone without trailing hair or children. There are few ripples from my action, but it seems as though with breath held those children hope I will swim on to safety. Meg Campbell’s range of mood and subject is too various to be adequately represented by a single example, but the above poem will suggest her quality. This is the best first book of poems I have read for some years.