CURRENTS OF TIME

Southland Times, Issue 24439, 20 May 1941, Page 3

CURRENTS OF TIME

Allen Curnow’s Poems ISLAND AND TIME. By Allen Curnow. The Caxton Press, Christchurch. Price 5/-. The conception which links these poems to a central viewpoint is metaphysical in tone, if not in structure. It reaches after a view of New Zealand as a slender land mass separated by wide oceans from the theatres of history, and as a psychological complex amid the currents of time. In this context time is not merely one of the dimensions of human environment; it is the flow and meaning of life itself —the vast interpenetration of all minds by the materials of experience. Nowhere does Allen Curnow develop these ideas explicitly; he knows that verse would sag beneath the weight of exposition. It is significant that the one poem in which he deals plainly with time is perhaps the least satisfying in the collection. But the thought of time, and of its cosmic urge in the life of these islands, is like a dissolvent of the mind, breaking his reveries into fragments that re- j new the vitality of distant events.

In one poem he detaches this mood from the imaginative method wherein it is generally submerged. “Fantasy on a Hillside” shows the starting point of meditation: hills beneath the climber’s feet, blue sea in the distance, lark’s song overhead—all merging into the momentary release, the creative enlargement. The continuity of mood survives the variety of occasion. In “House and Land” the contrast between a narrow immediacy and an equally narrow immersion in the past, is sustained by an effective contrast in character, lightly but clearly sketched. “Dialogue of Island and Time” contains the most formal treatment of ideas, suggestive rather than concentrated, and stiffened by a reaction from the catch-cries of national destiny. (The same theme is expressed more trenchantly in “It is Too Late.”)

SEARCH FOR LEGEND These poems, linked to an idea meant to be pervasive, are more ambitious than anything Mr Curnow has previously attempted. If they are to be judged as a connected series their value can be found chiefly in a new approach, a pioneer effort to bring perspective to a poet’s environment. The underlying theory may be too personal to be accepted or widely emulated; it is the method that should help most to bring nearer the “legendary fire.” But there are single poems—notably “The Unhistoric Story,” “The Scene,” and “Crash at Leithfield”—which must be given their place among the best achievements of contemporary verse in New Zealand. Of these three, “Crash at Leithfield” is perhaps the most successful, although by no means the deepest in thought. Its evocation of a flying tragedy combines an imaginative vision with a compassion that escapes beyond the reach of artifice. This is one of the few New Zealand poems of which it can be said that it is good, not merely in an occasional line or stanza, but as a complete production. Yet it is to “The Scene,” less finished as a whole though it may be, and bearing more marks of the poet’s workshop, that many readers will turn for the essential New Zealand flavour. The first stanza must be quoted: Bush falls like waves, there is little you can hear But the stumbling flight of pigeons And the buried anger of a truck's last gear Pounding in gorges the heat-massive day. Here among shaggy mountains cast away Man’s shape must be recast; Whatever he imagines Here on the unpeopled diffident scene be-

tween Tasman’s great stones, Pacific’s gradual sand; Whatever is possessed Between borders of blackened punga, beyond the town Where tarred roads into the scrub run blind.

Biblical Portraits WOMEN OF THE BIBLE. By H. V. Morton. Methuen and Co., London, through Isa Strang, Ltd. Price 6/6. H. V. Morton needs no introduction as a writer of travel sketches. His biblical trilogy now receives an addendum in this collection of portraits drawn from the Old and New Testaments. It is a truth discovered often by poets and novelists that the stories and characters of the Bible are beyond improvement: the matchless writing defies competition or emendation. Mr Morton wisely relies upon the original text for the foundations of his studies. His special contribution is the description of the scenic backgrounds, which he knows intimately, and which retain characteristics that have not changed since the days when Rebekah drew water for the camels of a stranger. He seeks always to discover the traits in his heroines which make them types of all womankind. His method is imaginative, and he writes smoothly. He succeeds best, however, in evoking the physical environment. As always in work of this kind, the portraits direct attention to the originals, changeless and complete in their biblical context.