Outside the Walls

This is the first book of a New Zealand poet whose work has appeared in several American and English periodicals. The poems cover a considerable period of development.

Like R.A.K. Mason, Louis Johnson has found his deepest springs of thought and feeling in the nonconformist borderland outside the walls, but under the shadow of Little Bethel – he exhibits as it were a naked conscience. But where Mason has used a broad rhetoric and on the whole traditional symbols, Johnson has continually turned his eyes to personal relationships. His world is a battlefield where quarter is at times given, whether by the operation of sexual love or surgical pity.

The best poems in this volume (and despite an unevenness of quality, they will bear comparison with almost any verse yet written in this country) are sketches and character studies biographical or autobiographical. The comparative dearth of sensuous images is perhaps a weakness in Johnson’s poetry. He has not the iron-hard tenacity of Donne, who can contain a world of metaphysics in a few conceits; so where his spasmodic insight fails him he tends to become flat-footed or unnecessarily obscure. Nevertheless he impresses one as a writer with a genuine grasp on the world of relationships, a continual fund of charity and an active probing mind. He expresses a humanism verging on theocentric: ‘A Young Girl Seen on a Tram’ and that remarkable religious poem ‘On the Road’ seem complementary rather than opposed. The first thing for a reader to recognise is that Johnson’s verse, whatever its occasional metaphoricalpage 79 complexity, is in essence simple and informed with the passion of pity:

Something is dead in them all who were ruthless, resourceful;
Meeting their adult mornings with eyes remorseful
Of where the bus will take them, and where the books led
Into the granite lusts of streets from a deceiving childhood.

I quote from the poem ‘Thoughts on my Schoolbooks’. The price of Johnson’s book is not prohibitive; and were the verse-reading public awake, it would be sold out in a fortnight.

1951 (49)