RECORDS reviewed by Bruce Mason

NO ORDINARY SUN Hone Tuwhare, read by the author Kiwi LD-12 33⅓ 12 in. L.P. Hone Tuwhare's first volume of poems became justly celebrated within weeks of its first printing; it was received with joy and awe throughout the country and abroad. Some of the poems suggested incantation and memories in their rise and fall, of ancient waiata and karakia; they called for the voice of the poet himself, a return to the oral traditions of bardic delivery, such as is happening all round the world. The desire for more intimate contact with the poet than print makes possible is now world-wide; the poet is in the cafe, on the streets, on television and on records. This note will talk therefore primarily of the poems spoken. Placed close to the microphone, as Mr Tuwhare is for most of his album, he reveals a voice of husky richness, the admirable and—one feels listening—perfect instrument for his images. Many poets reading, can disconcert; Eliot has never seemed to me his ideal interpreter, nor, nearer home, Allen Curnow or Louis Johnson. But set slightly farther off, for more declamatory pieces, Mr Tuwhare loses some richness and flexibility, and in the last poem Monologue, he attempts Scottish intonations for which he is not equipped. I note from the sleeve that ‘some of the poems were recorded at a reading given at the Birkenhead Public Library, during the North Shore Festival of the Arts’, which explains the cough at the end of one poem, and the somewhat easily elicited laughter during Monologue. I think audiences are a mistake; they may help the poet to achieve a performance, less easily secured in a studio, but they fragment the attention of the listener and can sometimes irritate. The listener is the ultimate participator, and he needs no colleagues. But the record is a fine achievement in the best of these beautiful incantatory poems, and their music is as sad as any ever made in this country. With what tender regret this fine poet notes the scarring of land, heart and mind that we have brought to his people! What insolent insects he makes of us, and how justly! This album also includes a waiata, of which I can judge little more, to my shame, than that his Maori is as majestic as his English; odd phrases leapt out of a musical fog at me like shafts of light. This disc is a noble performance, of a poet in action.

THE RETURN and ELEGY Poems by Alistair Campbell Music by Douglas Lilburn Kiwi SLD-13 33⅓ 12 in. L.P. To review The Return, I can think of no better way than to list the elements of what Douglas Lilburn calls a ‘sound image’. Distant traffic hum; faint wind; sea; wind; gulls; steam; hiss; tiny horns; hiccoughs; Mahi; muffled sob; Tane; kahikatea; kohekohe; tuatara, etc. A beautiful Maori voice (Mahi Potiki) softly intones a catalogue of Maori tree names and, at one point, an exquisite child's voice came through with ‘matai’ and ‘taraire’, reminding one of the beauty of the language we have so arrogantly supplanted and daily throttle. Let those who argue for anglicised Maori listen to this and reflect on the outrage we do every day to the most musical tongue in the world apart from Italian. Mr Lilburn establishes behind The Return, the last poem in Alistair Campbell's famous first volume, Mine Eyes Dazzle, a web of throbbing, delicate sound, never more than mezzoforte; the last images of a dying chief? The first of a Maori child, rocking in a flax cradle near a dull-glowing fire? Tim Eliott's fine voice was used for these same grave qualities; it stroked the images rather than propelled them; ‘gulls flung from the sea’, ‘the surf-loud beach’, ‘fires kindled in the wet sand’, ‘heads shrunken to a skull’. In the last lines of the poem, the sound image becomes explicit in ‘gods of the middle world/Their antique, bird-like chatter …’. The whole piece maintains the gravity of these lines, evoking a world of misty, mysterious shimmer. The reverse side of the disc is occupied by Mr Lilburn's beautiful setting of Alistair Campbell's Elegy. I must here confess that it took me some time to accept the Elegy, in Lilburn's setting. I have always enormously admired the Sings Harry sequence,