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Books

Short and terse

Educating the Body by Kevin Ireland (Caxton Press, Christchurch, 1967, $1.50) reviewed by Jan Walker.

This latest collection of Kevin Ireland's poetry for the most part consists of short narrow poems simple in their content and terse in their arrangement. They are in fact often too tight in their style and give only the bones of an idea uncovered by surrounding meat.

They are rather preludes to something longer and are too concerned with achieving a technical perfection in their slight form. Ireland in these poems is playing with the compression of ideas and often in his desire for conciseness subordinates the expression of his ideas as shown in Striking a Pose and After-Thought.

Where he is not overworking the hidebound rhymes and cleverness his short poems have a delicacy and freshness as seen in the tide poem Educating the Body and in Violence.

In his longer poems however, where he seems less concerned with technical manipulation, he demonstrates a power of combining skilful construction with very clear observation. This is especially notable in A Hard Country, The Poor Go Fishing, and his very moving Holiday—the last I will quote in full as an example of the poet's best use of the natural rhythms of the ebbing tide and sleepy swelling motions of feeling—

everything
was the wrong
way round today:
we were sleepy
with sunlight
and could not
wake up properly
till it was night:
we only just
got up in time
to go down and watch
the incoming tide
drive the river
back through
the town
still
nothing
went right:
either the land
seemed to be sinking
as the sea spilled in
or the water was suddenly
running
uphill

Kevin Ireland has widened and broadened the boundaries of feeling and phenomena around him and has shown himself to be a poet whose eyes are wide open and who is capable of expressing these things through writing.