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"Blue Magic"

I feel no apology is due for introducing Spike readers to Marna Service, whose collection of poems, 'Blue Magic," has appeared within the last month. Miss Service's poetry has the greater interest for us, inasmuch as she is a New Zealand poet, who, thank heaven, avoids local colour. She is an undergraduate of Otago University College. Her modest, blue-covered booklet of poems is illustrated with engaging silhouettes by Miss Alison Grant, whose art but indicates the charm of the poems themselves. The title poem, "Blue Magic," would be remarkable in any authology of modern verse for its atmosphere and its almost mystic imaginativeness—characteristics found throughout the volume. One feels a certain startling inevitability about "Silence":—

"There is a holy stillness on the hill:
The fields lie quiet, sweet with morning dew.
Great God is passing, holding deep his breath
At some old wonder which he sees anew.

There is no singing as I heard before,
No tree-talk, neither any stream's soft roll . . .
He feels afresh the beauty of His world,
Through every beat of wonder in my soul."

Real imagination, sincere and unaffected, blossoms here; and inspiration is rare enough in these days for us to welcome it with clue humility, even were it not allied to a felicity of expression and skill in composition such as Miss Service displays. What word-picture more apt or more arresting than that of David, the "moody purple King?" or, of the sand-hills in "Desert" that—

"leaned down upon me, thick with heat,
And crushed me at their burning feet."

Or the "Chimney Cat" of which—

"I still can hear the sooty tread."

The poems are not mere purple daubs of colour, for the entirety of their images is broken by picking out single lines, eminently quotable though they be. Every line in "The Cloud" is pictorial, but the real beauty of the poem lies in the conception it embodies, which is lost in quotation. One can, however, hardly resist quoting from "Midnight"—

"And through the half-closed shutters of the blind,
The fingers of the moonlight poke and find
The silver hairpins and the looking-glass.
I lie awake. Outside, the apple tree,
Bent and disfigured by the eastern wind,
Cranes round to see its own deformity."

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But you will find figures just as enchanting in The Three Tall Trees,"' or "Sapphires," or "Wizard Beads," which has a tang of the fantasy of "Goblin Market." Some of her poems, undoubtedly, are merely pretty fancies, childish makebelieve; but her pen has also evoked "The Gipsy Ghost," innate with power and vitality.

Blue Magic" makes a strong appeal to those who enjoy modern poetry; it should also charm away the prejudices of those who profess indifference to poetic flights. For the aspiring poets, of whom our 'Varsity Colleges possess, perhaps, a greater number than does any other single body, the collection is an encouraging model of technique and inspiration—and, may one add, of artistic restraint.

—K.C.B.