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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Vol 35 no. 24. 28th September 1972

From Bottle Creek

page 13

From Bottle Creek

Photo of a man

Sam Hunt;s poems work best when he is there to say them This is because he has a compelling presence and because the poems, once you have heard them from him, are irrevocably oral poems from that time. Other reviewers have noted the difficulty of dissociating poems from the prescence. Sam is sometimes reproached for posturing, for creating and popularizing an image of himself. But he is so consistent that, if he is promoting an illusion, he's certainly a victim of it himself.

But he doesn't seem to be a victim. He's usually having a good time if he can. Perhaps the reason that his concert appearences are memorable is that his poems, although rhetorical, are sparely so, that the 'I' persona of the poems is so plangently attuned to the guise of the performer, The spareness of the rhetoric - mainly rhythmical assomance and fugitive approximate rhyme restrains those recurring sentimentally education situations from the maudlin. And wryness and whimsy recur too, which helps.

Many of the poems deal with personal situations, but capture them with resonant immediacy1. An example of this is the child/woman ambiguity of

Come on, off to bed
in Photograph of Robin in War—Paint, or the suggestion of
I waved like a windsock
in wish for an air-trip north.

Another strength is an ambiguously surrealistic play of imagery - notably in The Gulls where the final hallucinary statement momentarily obscures a psychological truism. But there are poems where this technique is muffled, and points towards (without reading) obscurity and portentousness.

But this indicates another of Sam's strengths — that he is rarely obscure, always direct, usually warm, as Dr. Frank MacKay has said, "He's not embarrassed to show some joy at the beauty of a nature object." I'm sure that this spontaneity sets quite a few refined cerebralist literati nerves on edge and accounts for Sam's somewhat isolated position- from some cliques, anyway.

Book Two of the set, When Morning Comes, consists

of four songs which variously show the influence of Bob Dylan and R & B. They work best as songs, especially Tony Backhouse's setting of the outstanding one, Hot Water Bottle Baby Blues.

The book's critical, as opposed to popular, (unprecedented) reception has been mixed, Craccum's review was scurrilous and spiteful, but it was right about one thing — the packaging. The commercial artist's script is quite inappropriate to the poems these are, and the photos came out badly or not at all.

As for the price — Alister Taylor isn't going broke over this one, either. It works out at under ten cents a poem - that's nothing to complain about.

— E.G.