Poems need particulars

Press, 19 February 1983, Page 16

Poems need particulars

Sense of Being. By Ron Riddell. Writers and Artists Press, 1982. 64 pp. $8.95. The Thing Called You and the Thing Called I. By Gerald Foster. Blackbird Press, 1982. 24 pp. $4.95. (Reviewed by John Newton) The 40 or so poems which make up Ron Riddell’s new collection are divided into two sections. The first is entitled “A World of Grey/the Reign of Heaven.” and the poems in it contrast a spiritual and, more specifically.' a Christian ideal with the physical and emotional dreariness which the author associates with urban life. In the second half of the book he explores the Coromandel Peninsula, and communal living, in search of a realisation of that same ideal. A certain resemblance to late Baxter may be apparent from this description. Riddell has obviously been most taken with the Jerusalem poetry, but the influence is poorly digested and his own Coromandel poems often read rather like imitations of that model. Not surprisingly, they fare poorly by comparison. Riddell borrows Baxter's sonnet shape, but his rhythms and use of line are lifeless, particularly in poems such as “Awakening” and "Prayer in the Coromandel Ranges." Baxter's spiritual affirmations are usually convincing. Rooted as they are in a vivid recreation of the world around him, his Jerusalem poems draw added strength from his willingness to acknowledge what is equivocal in that environment, as well as what is comforting.

In Riddell’s case, however, there are too many assertions supported by too little evidence. When such evidence is presented, predictable pairings of images

— grey streets against buds and flowers, grey businessmen against singing birds — only serve to emphasise the simplistic nature of the vision offered. , There is no lack of sincerity in these poems, but there is little to make the reader re-examine his environment, and hence to bring him round to the poet’s view of it. What these poems lack, and what might be learned from Baxter, is that vigorous appreciation of the material world which makes, his particular spiritual interpretation of it credible and engaging. “Sense of Being" is Riddell’s sixth book of poems, and is illustrated by Kate Whitfield, the poet’s wife. The hills and coast west of Wellington are where several of the poems in Gerald Foster’s collection begin. Like Riddell, however, he seldom supplies enough of the particular to make his generalisations convincing or memorable. There is, indeed, something rather presumptuous in his repeated attempts to describe New Zealand’s national history in a handful of stanzas. Poems like “Pushin’ on Through" and “Britain Sent” do more to trivialise our cultural experience than to shed light on it. with a triteness of observation being echoed in the relentless sing-song tetrameters and predictable rhymes. This, however, is a first volume, and it does improve somewhat as it goes on. The small, understated poem called “Farm" seems to me to offer a more likely way of elucidating that “New Zealand experience” with which the poet is so concerned. A more elusive and less nation-conscious style is at work in

“Hamlet,” with its neatly sustained glass imagery, and in the suggestive “Cancer.” There might well be profit in further exploring this manner.