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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Unicorn Waking

Unicorn Waking

Despite its unfortunate title, this book of verse, by a New Zealand poet, is neither trivial nor amateur. The poet knows her own mind and does not try to borrow anyone else’s. According to her own account, she received the gift of poetry from a unicorn –

Arching his supple neck, fastidiously,
He drank, while ripples set ablaze with light
His coined reflection . . .
Then, swift as elemental fire he leapt
And lightly fled . . .

The unicorn was replaced by a different daemon, a donkey, an animal prone to irreverence but more easily domesticated –

I said I was quite good at writing.
Though what I wrote was not so good:
So copied down from his dictating
Some Pastorals about the wood . . .

The ass, the beast of burden, is most efficient: and an ass’s heel can kick hard. This book contains poems in many styles on many topics, with an epigrammatic style and domestic topics predominating. The poet has all the command of the formal craft of verse-making that she needs. She has already enough insight to see under the shell of society; but her vigorous intellect tends to sterilise its subject-matter. There is a sense in which reticence is a handicap for a poet – a poet may leave the best poems unwritten because they are too near the bone. I think this poet should risk more, give away more, cut deeper. Reticent, witty, indirect, she is too often carving cherrystones when she could already be writing most of the time about what concerns her most. ‘Happy Ending’ (a poem about a cat which is also a comment on human isolation and endurance), ‘Factory Girl, 1944’, ‘Air Raids at Seventy-five’, ‘Crevasse in Time’, ‘Blue Peter’, ‘The Long Parting’, and certain passages in a semi-narrative poempage 521 called ‘The Family Album’ indicate that the unicorn is not dead, but moves in its sleep. If he were wholly awake, Helen Blackshaw could be, I think, a very good poet indeed.

1962 (272)