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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Poetry at Home

Poetry at Home

The poems in this new book by W. Hart-Smith have neither the force nor the conciseness of those in Christopher Columbus, the first of the Caxton Poets series. Nevertheless, there are many vivid sketches to atone for a general lack of profundity. ‘The Ghost of Mackenzie’s Dog’ and ‘Shag Rookery’ are poems in which the theme is strong enough to bind together the free verse form which Mr Hart-Smith has used almost without variation. Though dexterous and pleasing at a first reading, the verse shows its weakness when compared with that of Basil Dowling, another poet, many of whose themes are drawn from the Canterbury landscape. Alongside the genuine article, Mr Hart- Smith’s poems (in the present volume) seem little more than guidebook stuff, neat boxes of words which exclude the infinitely complex, even shattering intimations that are the source and subject matter of mature poetry.

The poems of M.K. Joseph are, however, a different kettle of fish. A satirist requires a complete mastery of traditional verse form, a broad intellectual background, and something which badly needs saying – all of which Mr Joseph possesses. He has learnt much from MacNeice and the earlier Eliot, and from Auden more perhaps than he can easily assimilate, a tendency to separate the world of experience into brittle scientific and sociological categories. But this minor weakness is offset by his sane and vigorous humour. The ‘Secular Litany’ should be nailed on every schoolroom wall. One finds in it the same inspired social criticism which makes Fairburn’s Dominion a landmark in New Zealand letters; and it is a poem of most excellent verve and precise structure. The best of the war poems compare favourably with most of the verse in English war anthologies:

What will you dream tonight, soldier, soldier?
I shall see children playing in the rubble of a street
And a girl who turned to folly for a tin of meat
I shall hear an old man weeping by a broken door
And I shan’t sleep so easy as the lads who march no more.

The highest test for any skilled poet lies in the composition of a good ballad – for this form complete sincerity is essential. Mr Joseph shows himself capable of handling both ballad and rigid stanzaic form. The freshness of his imagination preserves him from prosiness. He is admirably lucid. This little book would be well worth buying at double the price.

1951 (45)