Break-through

One could give this book the familiar dry reception – a capable handling of speech rhythms, the tricks of the trade learnt to the hilt. It would be true enough, but not worthy of this poet. Maturity is hard to come by; and Gloria Rawlinson has laboured to the point of break-through, where the inner and outer worlds coalesce and the words obey the difficult vision –

Our faith’s repose they most deride
When to our bay the black swans come
Flockt to the wintering harbour home;
Night that crooned here like a shell
With dancelight beating on pitchy tide
Now falls barbed, untuneable . . .

I quote from the beginning of the poem ‘Black Swans’. One gathers that the repose of the swans on the water, representing the wild peace of the natural world, both tempts and shows up, by contrast the repose of the Christian believer.

Some such tension is the steel cable by which Miss Rawlinson has learnt to lift heavy weights. If you contrast the one ill-chosen poem in this book, ‘Bush Economy’, with another poem, ‘From Ur to Erewhon’, Miss Rawlinson’s early weakness and later strength will be clearly apparent. In the first poem a gnome with a wagging beard offers flower-dolls for sale at a log counter. This kind of image was the tedious stock-in-trade of her first literary milieu, evident in The Perfume Vendor; most New Zealand poets of the time were trapped by it, and I suspect it sprang as much from the airless domestic boxes of our nation as from a specific mandarin tradition. But whimsy is set aside in her mature work for genuine apocalyptic fantasy –

But Lord Storm lashed the river Lord Storm lit a fire
An evil fire in the hearts of enemies
Our city died in flames even as foretold
On night’s enormous tablet writ with stars . . .

The technical development is very great; yet I feel that the break-through turns far more on the acquisition by the poet of a stable view of reality thanpage 655 on any renovation of technical equipment. The new vision was first clearly apparent in the splendid sequence, ‘The Islands Where I Was Born’, in which the poet moved into conscious possession of her own past. Some comparison can be made with the final lucidity of Robin Hyde. Miss Rawlinson begins now, with the resources of a formidable intellect, and the faculty of sensation released from labour in the saltmines, at the point where Robin Hyde laid down her pen.

1963 (306)