Antipodean Voyages

This new volume contains the Columbus sequence first published by the Caxton Press, and three other sections, including New Zealand and Australian poems. In feeling and method Mr Hart-Smith is an antipodean Lawrence, though he lacks the range and profundity of his master. The same lens is focusedpage 400 to observe a derelict ship, a steam-roller, a boomerang, or a Maori woman climbing into a taxi. Each poem depends on a moment of illumination, the crystalline glitter of a single unique object or event. It is probable that Mr Hart-Smith developed his staccato rhythms and consciously depthless images in reaction from the mellifluous banality of the weaker kind of Georgian poetry. Often these methods serve him well, as in ‘Neptune’s Horses’ –

Sometimes they rise
when the great gales
howl and blow,
break to the surface

whinnying, tossing
the hair of their manes
and unkempt
tails. They kick

with mighty shuddering kick
our helpless ship . . .

It is the same method that Mr Glover has used to overcome similar original weaknesses in his poetic training. But Mr Hart-Smith, whose experience of the chaos of the modern environment is equally great, lacks the developed irony which Mr Glover has used to meet and conquer it. One senses his disquiet, as in the final lines of ‘Kangaroo’ –

This skin of the land is deep fur
maddeningly come alive
with deliberate great fleas . . .

These lines convey powerfully the quality of meaningless and violent surface activity. But the lens of a Lawrentian nature mystique is inadequate to see beyond nature to a possible resolution of conflict. Mr Hart-Smith’s best work is still contained in the Columbus sequence, possibly because the lens of the fifteenth-century Spanish navigator was a different one, and through it the world could be seen as a whole.

1959 (205)