A New and Strong Talent

Because the idiom is colloquial and the tone often subdued, it could happen that a casual reader might miss the unusual quality of this first book of poems. The biographical note indicates that the author is a New Zealand-born Marist priest. Leaving aside three or four poems with specifically sacerdotal themes, I doubt whether one who had not been told would recognise John Weir’s primary vocation; and this is as it should be. Poets are not inspired in the prophetic sense (though many delude themselves they are), nor should a priest exercise his teaching authority by writing rhymed sermons. John Weir (I think) avoids both temptations. Yet I feel his poetry is coloured by special experiences of tension, solitude, and that sign of contradiction which belongs to those who have a strong and real double vocation.

There are roughly three kinds of poem in this book – poems of place, poems that hinge on the author’s relation to God, and poems that crystallise around some relation to another creature. The poems of place are often singularly beautiful and perfect in execution:

Nothing grows well here. Ti-tree, bent like old men,
leans shoreward in the strong sun while wind
whips sand against your face and summerlong haze
throbs on smoking hills: in punga valleys,
cool as an eel, water rushes from gullies,
funnelling through river-gravel. Clay gapes
each dozen yards from the gouged-out hill face
near shining water, blind as the stars.

I quote from the second stanza of ‘Karamea’. In this poem, and in several others, John Weir writes as a New Zealander, exploring the body of the country, and because of their great beauty and lucidity some readers may prefer them. Yet the strictly devotional poems (‘Prayer to the Saviour’, ‘Early Morning Near Napier’, ‘For the Grace of a Good Death’) dig deeper, exercising the last inch of the muscles of the mind; and the poems about people (‘In Willis Street’, ‘Elegy for My Father’, ‘An Old Man Thinks of His Childhood’), though sometimes awkward in their combination of strong images and colloquial language, arepage 654 a growing-point, and carry the greatest potential richness. The Sudden Sun is an astonishingly mature first book. One hopes that John Weir will be able to continue; for he possesses intellectual courage and an awareness of the deep wounds and ambiguities of the present age.

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