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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

New Poets

New Poets

Both these poets are unfamiliar to us as names in modern English poetry. Miss Scovell, one learns from the dust-jacket, has already had published two books of verse; Mr Press, on the other hand, is making a first appearance. The Oxford University Press is to be congratulated for unusual generosity in taking the risk of publishing the work of a new poet – a risk which most publishers now avoid like leprosy. Mr Press justifies their parental trust. His poems are highly readable, intellectually acute, and essential normal ’prentice work. But a tendency to abstract language makes his verse too thin at times –

. . . I was exempt from discontent
And aching disillusionment.
I was immune from pain and grief,
Guarded by steady irony;
Why did you come, when I was free,
To trouble my calm unbelief?

This is an example of the good half-poem (good as exact statement, but only half a poem) which Mr Press writes rather too often. Africa, however, renews in him the fibres of poetry: it horrifies him with violence, in female circumcision rites; it moves him also to grief and a trace of envy. One feels that he leaves Africa too soon behind.

Miss Scannell brings to her poetry a most rare innocence and maturity of heart and mind. Her themes are not unusual – chrysanthemums in a garden, the habits of children asleep and awake, isolation, distance, the mystery of human identity – but her strong delicate poems, like scrollwork done in steel, reveal the truth of her unique experience.

The days fail: night broods over afternoon;
And at my child’s first drink beyond the night
Her skin is silver in the early light,
Sweet the grey morning and the raiders gone.

page 321

These four lines come from a sequence quite unparalleled, I imagine, in English poetry – ‘The First Year’, love poems of a mother to a child, in which no trace of stereotyped feeling or language appears. She understands so much and pretends so little. Her descriptive and metaphorical powers match her insight.

1957 (161)