FOREWORD BY WALTER DE LA

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 36, 12 February 1938, Page 26

FOREWORD BY WALTER DE LA

MARE

Another New Zealand poet-has found favour in the eyes of a London publisher. For several years now her many admirers at home have looked for a collection ii Eileen Duggan's poems. Their wishes have been met: a slim, chaste volume, the work of Allen and Unwin, has arrived, and is now on the market. It contains 37 sets of verse, and —a nice compliment —a foreword by Walter de la Mare, himself a singer of extraordinary charm. His introduction is analytical, and honest, and occasionally critical. He finds much to praise, but is also sincere and courageous enough (as all downright critics ought to be) not to overlook what he deems work of less worth. He realises that at her best Miss Duggan sets an. enviably high standard, but at the same time he feels that, like almost every poet the world has known, she has her less inspired moments. (Probably Walter de la Mare is not completely satisfied with every poem he has had published.) Anyway, his commentary should be a lesson to those who, being neither analytical nor sincere, profess to see perfection where perfection is not. That sort of thing is no help whatever to the subject, though he or she may well revel in it.

Miss Duggan has made a considerable reputation with her poetry—and deserves it. Her work has been welcomed in London (the "New English Weekly") and America ("The Commonweal"). It has at times a compelling spiritual quality, at other times a benign philosophy that holds the attention, and always (or almost always) an'art (as Walter de la Mare puts it) "which is above Nature." Also: "At their best (he adds) these poems reveal an absolute control of words, as far as this is possible, in their writer's central meaning. And that being so, the expression may appear on occasion awkward, rough, even violent. It is never false or borrowed. . . . We have to listen if we are to catch their overtones. There is little that is obscure . . . nothing acidly critical of her follow-creatures or shallowly propagandist. We are in the presence of a positive little universe, and very few true poems exhibit a negative one." Few, if any, discerning literary minds will disagree with that statement.

Sometimes Miss Duggan's themes are less important than her handling of them: in "Picture," for example. Here and there (as in "Endurance") her lines move heavily, and lack the feeling that endows richly other of the poems. Again (to agree once more with Walter de la Mare) there are poems which read not so spontaneously as their fellows, indicating a triumph of art over inspiration. But, as against these, Miss Duggan can set work which establishes her as permanently in the van of New Zealand poets. Indeed, poems of the true quality of "Pilgrimage," "Autumn," (shot through with glowing, unforced metaphor), "St. Peter" (as nearly perfect in conception and statement as is humanly possible), "Twilight," "After the Annunciation," and "The Oxen," would help to grace anthologies oversea. It may appropriately be added that she was represented in an American-collected anthology a few years ago, and that the late "AW (G. W. Russell), the Irish poet and mystic, was greatly impressed by her talent.