Precise and accomplished poetry

Press, 15 November 1986, Page 25

Precise and accomplished poetry

Professor Musgrove’s Canary. By Elizabeth Smither. Auckland University Press, 1986. 67 pp. $13.50. The Entrance to Purgatory. By lain Lonie. John Mclndoe, 1986. 54 pp. $9.95. Making the far Land Glow. By Bill Sewell. John Mclndoe, 1986. 56 pp. $9.95. (Reviewed by Tom Weston) Elizabeth Smither is one of our most accomplished poets. Even so, her audience is small, due in part to what often seems an inaccessible structure. She delights in the use of casual punctuation and the omission of the odd word. Her poems are small, intense embroideries of sound. There is much there, however, and a careful study is often rewarded. This volume is divided into three sections. The first is a more general collection, catalogued under the title poem. “Professor Musgrove’s Canary” tells of the miner’s canary that reacts to a fetid or poisonous atmosphere. The poem is ambiguously set in the past tense, slipping into an occasional present. There are some unsubtle suggestions here. Smither writes often of the role of the poet — and that of the audience. She is clearly an action person, poet rather than audience. She is Horatio, not Hamlet: “Get below, a stiff drink, clean the chain mail.” Despite this, she acknowledges that those in the audience have the last word; after all, they are the ones who interpret the words in their own

The second section, dedicated to the memory of her father, is prefigured by earlier references to going underground or to the putting on of

different skin. The suggestion is of a transitionary existence on this world. Some of the poems here are a little shaky: the translation of such intense emotion into poetry is no easy one. lain Lonie, too, deals with death in the first part of his collection. To some extent he is more successful than Elizabeth Smither, though still sustaining a relatively high casualty rate. The more consistent .theme of death, followed by a rejuvenation (which is the basis of his volume) is perhaps a better vehicle than that more piecemeal approach adopted by Smither. Lonie leads into some wordy overstatement, but generally speaking his poetry is elegantly controlled and worthy of attention. On the subject of death he can be both genuine and moving. The second half of his volume casts the poet as a canoe at sea, with a subsequent landing and a (perhaps ambiguous) putting out of roots: “sending up the green roots vertical.” The title poem is the last in the collection, leaving the author a point from which to go on from — in much the same way as did James Joyce with Stephen in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”

The last poem, in particular, reminds of Allen Curnow. The opening lines, “What you will notice first is the air’s greater clarity...,” seem to owe a substantial debt. Even more so is that owed by Bill Sewell. Always an elegant and lucid speaker, he has moved closer to Curnow than any other poet writing in New Zealand. He displays considerable virtuosity, even if it is partially derivative. “Making the Far Land Glow” is Bill Sewell’s third volume. It reveals a far more personal viewpoint than earlier volumes. It loses none of the crispness of the best of his previous poetry.

The two earlier books dealt with the urge to fly. This continues here in a slightly different form. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is at its core: love, death, the underworld, the sky, light and dark. Characters' are leaving or looking back: “... you will always look back in blindness and make it • beautiful.”

This sort of precision has a curiously English air to it. I am reminded (in addition to Curnow) of the exact tone of, say, a Christopher Logue.