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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

New Zealand Writing

page 592

New Zealand Writing

Phyllis Garrard’s verse is, I think, the kind of thing most New Zealanders secretly consider poetry to be – an exercise in adult childishness, star-gazing and sentimental. The pity of it is that this writer has a real ballad gift. But her shearers speak with a bogus dialect, and Moana, her young Maori girl, is idealised out of recognition. I recommend her book to those readers who will naturally prefer it to Bruce Beaver’s wry honest verses –

The streets are full of virgins, sour
And sweet, both round and angular.
The slick young men with dingo hips
See only baited moving traps.
From narrow lanes their laughter bays . . .

The word ‘dingo’, with its precise nuances of feeling, lifts the whole stanza from the ordinary to the excellent. There are many such happy strokes in this book. At times, though, Mr Beaver muffles his poems with too much comment. The poems in which he had learnt a light handling of his themes from Louis MacNeice are much better than those which betray the heavy influence of T.S. Eliot. His range is wide, however – children, lovers, old age pensioners come to life in his pages – and if I were editing a present-day anthology of New Zealand verse, I would choose several from this book.

Nobody interested in the development of New Zealand verse or prose could afford not to read this year’s selection from Otago University. It happens to contain three new and surprising love poems by R.A.K. Mason, a story by Barry Crump far more hard-hitting than anything he has turned out for money, two good acrid poems by David Holmes, the best verse that Victory O’Leary has yet written, and an amazing story about a lycanthropic parson by Peter Burns. There are other raisins in the pudding, and the lay-out by Geoff Adams, is first-rate.

The Palmerston North periodical is more in the common run of university magazines. It contains, with some lively intelligent verse and stories by writers in the making, two very good poems by Stewart Slater and a delightful monoprint by Douglas Lunn.

1962 (282)