Verse Collections

I began reading A.I.H. Paterson’s book of poems with a trace of prejudice, since this writer’s verse had in the past seemed to me too much a series of manufactured articles, like the wire-and-tin mobiles that people hang up in pubs. But a verse collection is different from a few poems scatteredpage 752 in university magazines; and I have had the pleasant experience of being converted –

. . . And the doldrums and the horse latitudes,
In their way, served to lull the traveller
With fair promises of still fairer climes,
Of distant skies and idle interludes,
Until ambition’s heel had lost its spur
That pricks out virtues from youth’s early crimes . . .

This quotation from one of the best of Mr Paterson’s poems, the first from a sequence concerning the disillusionment inherent in the settlement of New Zealand, demonstrates his intellectual grip on a complex metaphor, and equally his vision of the causes of spiritual barrenness. Perhaps a third of the poems in this book have a similar control, authority, and openness to the life of this country – not by any means a small quota for a first book – though the rest of them suffer either from fragmentariness or from a sense of verbal strain as if the poet were unsure of his theme. I feel free to welcome Caves in the Hills and hope that the desire for inner solitude implicit in most of Mr Paterson’s work will not lead to any retreat from the wars of language.

Sylvia Thomson’s verse expresses strong feelings about various matters – music, a white heron, Peter Pan, Pompeii, Joan of Arc, Anzac Day, a last- century cricket match. Among much debris there are some flashes of real eloquence and intuition. But the poet was ill-advised to rhyme ‘Mowries’ with ‘cowries’ in an unsuccessful poem on the 1953 visit of Queen Elizabeth II to New Zealand. In a moment of aberration, at some official welcome, a member of the Ngapuhi might happen to transfer her to an earth oven.

1965 (370)