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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

A New Zealand Poet

A New Zealand Poet

This is a very good first book of verse by a New Zealand poet. One requires of such a book, for satisfaction, that the poet should know what he is doing with form and that the book should reveal some energetic graph of experience, a more or less recognisable yet unencountered world. Mr Slater’s work fulfilspage 593 both requirements. His forms are subtle and fluid, but by no means diffuse; he has already hammered out his own idiom. Nor is there the least uncertainty in his grasp of those private occasions which are the kernel of a good poem:

Come, Coppermouth, lean your blond head here.
No, this is not blood in my glass, but wine;
Blame Hawke’s Bay sun if I seem to sway.
They said your name but I wasn’t near;
Never ask nor remember mine,
Nor my pallid face as close as day . . .

That is the first stanza of a clear-cut memorable poem called ‘Party’. It swings, of course, on the ambiguity of ‘Coppermouth’ – the colour of the girl’s lipstick, and recalling obliquely the name of a dangerous snake. Mr Slater possesses an active intellect; but he does not fall into the trap of being cleverer than the poem requires. One is aware of a world behind the poems – a world of substance with which the reader makes contact through the poet’s preoccupations – mountaineering, music, the physics laboratory, and varsity parties. I feel that the dull metallic lustre of Mr Slater’s love poetry is something quite new –

Rain in the High Street splinters down –
Straight black hair over naked shoulders.

This is a complete poem, ‘Haiku’, the best haiku I have ever read, possibly the finest poem of the selection. Mr Slater has also succeeded in echoing Martial and translating Catullus. In his case one does not have to speak of promise. The real enigma is – how did such well-hammered poetry get made here at all?

1962 (283)