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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

[Review of Fleur Adcock’s Tigers]

[Review of Fleur Adcock’s Tigers]

There are several ways in which I could review this new book of poems by Fleur Adcock. I could say with justice that it contains some of the best work ever produced by a woman poet of New Zealand origin. But this is a left-handed compliment. Our women writers have not on the whole been conspicuous for their work in poetry – I can think of only a few names, whereas in the short story and the novel there are dozens who have written and published many magnificent things. Again, to say ‘woman poet’ is itself a peculiar statement – can poetry be defined in terms of the sexes? Perhaps not. On the other hand, Fleur Adcock’s poems are distinctly and sometimes aggressively feminine in tone. Take these lines from one of the sharpest and most penetrating poems in the book – ‘Advice to a Discarded Lover’ –

Think, now: if you have found a dead bird,
Not only dead, not only fallen,
But full of maggots: what do you feel –
More pity or more revulsion? . . .

page 676

And a few lines later on –

. . . perhaps you find
The analogy I have chosen
For our dead affair rather gruesome –
Too unpleasant a comparison.

It is not accidental. In you
I see maggots close to the surface.
You are eaten up by self-pity,
Crawling with unlovable pathos.

If I were to touch you I should feel
Against my fingers fat, moist worm-skin.
Do not ask me for charity now.
Go away until your bones are clean.

An ironical, surgical tone – negative images handled with a perfect intellectual poise – I do not think a man would ever write in quite this way, so personally and at the same time with such an edge of clinical detachment. The poem corresponds exactly to a moment of intellectual maturity in a woman’s understanding of what has been a love relationship. The desire for cleanliness, the revulsion against a state of emotional decay – certainly writers of both sexes can find this, but Adcock’s expression of it is remarkable for two reasons – first, that she gets as near to total honesty as any writer can – secondly, that her writing, though it does express a woman’s point of view, lacks the stage draping, the sentimental provisos and above all the timidity which has so often characterised the work of women poets in this country. A passion for honesty does not commonly pervade the writing our women have done on erotic or near-erotic themes. Admittedly, none can understand their difficulty.

They have felt much more strongly than the men have done that any personal statement in verse or prose would be brought under a harshly critical social lens – that they might make enemies in their own community – that they were, in a sense, exposing themselves to the naked blast of reaction from a society likely to remain for a long time intellectually immature. It is what I have often meant by the statement that the first thing a New Zealand writer has to do is to anaesthetise or otherwise incapacitate the Puritan censor in his or her own mind. And it has been hardest for our women to do this – partly because of their more intensive social conditioning, partly because, as women, they have often found that their truest themes were very close to their own nerves and blood and bones. Fleur Adcock frequently breaks through this barrier by an act of intellectual courage and aggression. For this reason page 677 even her most private work may have a definite social and therapeutic value for New Zealand readers.

To say what happens is easy enough – to measure achievement is more difficult. Having already made it clear that I regard this book of poems – so aptly called ‘Tigers’ – as a unique break-through by a woman poet of New Zealand origin, I will try to forget the distinction between the sexes and deal with the poems simply as poems. I think she is a master of the verse parable. That is to say – she can make an exact sensory statement, deceptively simple, yet eventually surrealist, which leaves the reader with a new insight into the human condition itself. Thus, in what is by my estimate the finest poem in the book – among many perfectly made and remarkable pieces – a poem called ‘The Water Below’ – she begins with a most convincing practical statement –

This house is floored with water,
Wall to wall, a deep green pit,
Still and gleaming, edged with stone.
Over it are built stairways
And railed living-areas
In wrought iron . . .

Of course – one thinks – ‘why should a house not be floored with green water instead of a wall-to-wall carpet? In a tent the floor is grass – in a hut of sun-dried bricks it may be earth – why not water for a change?’ Already one has been caught by this highly practicable fable – and by the time the end of the poem hits one like a brick on the back of the head, one is wholly ready to accept the poet’s view of the human condition –

Under my grandmother’s house
In Drury, when I was three,
I always believed there was
Water: lift up the floorboards
And you would see it – a lake,
A subterranean sea.
True, I played under the house
And saw only hard-packed earth,
Wooden piles, gardening tools,
A place to hunt for lizards.
That was different: below
I saw no water. Above,
I knew it must still be there,
Waiting. (For why did we say
‘Forgive us our trespasses,
Deliver us from evil?’)
page 678 Always under the safe house
Lies the pool, the hidden sea
Created before we were.
It is not easy to drain
The waters under the earth.

It is a measure of Fleur Adcock’s extreme proficiency as a craftsman that she has used the same unrhymed metre Matthew Arnold used in his moralistic poem ‘Rugby Chapel’ for a totally different purpose. Behind craftsmanship, there are the other factors – wit, intellectual courage, inventiveness, a precise use of the biological image – and most of all perhaps, a sheer vigour, a sense of reality binding the actual and imagined worlds together. One could say in a wholly positive sense that – by tackling many of the themes that other poets do not dare to tackle – the personal morass, the ambiguities of Eros – Fleur Adcock is one of the sanest poets one is likely to find; and a great many of the books of verse that issue yearly from the English and American presses are pallid and trivial compared to this one.

1968? (557)