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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

The Right to Speak

The Right to Speak

It is part of the professional critic’s repertoire to refer to a new poet as a poet of ‘promise’; yet these exuberant and untrimmed poems are perhaps most impressive on account of the load of strong feeling and half-forged insights which they carry – feeling and insight which establish Mr Mincher’s right to speak, but hardly yet enable him to reach a mature balance. They promise more than they achieve. Reversing Roy Campbell’s dictum – the horse is undeniably present, a healthy bucking bronco, but the snaffle and the bit are inclined to slip off. The ballad of Barlow, ‘the man from Mahoanui’,page 396 is a first-rate poem flawed to second-rate by lack of emotional and formal balance –

. . . Till hot by Firth’s stable wall
The viper’s venom squibs
Called the matter plain and stitched
The warrant to his ribs
Stark in the web of history
With the blood of his mother’s name,
And handled by the border cops
As so much shame . . .

The first stanza quoted should serve to illustrate Mr Mincher’s superb, ferocious gift of metaphor (the one certain mark of genuine poetic powers); the second stanza illustrates the unfortunate florid language into which the poem too readily collapses. At the same time, I have no fault at all to find with Mr Mincher’s traditional sentiments. Consider the ‘working man’s wife’ whom he sees at the cinema –

With flash of child’s eyes on a cut-glass gem
Imbibe the powdered pranks of sluts in mink
Unfit to touch your garment’s faded hem.

Sophisticated readers may find the statement naïve; but others will recognise the thud of the bullet in the middle of the target. None of the twenty-three poems is trivial, and some have as much to say as Basil Dowling, but with a racier movement. The Handcraft Press is to be congratulated on this necessary publication.

1959 (200)