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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Suburban Mirrors

Suburban Mirrors

Among New Zealand poets Keith Sinclair has been distinguished by a warm, romantic, lyrical gift, and a tendency to use the extended conceit or metaphor. Some of the warmth perhaps and certainly many of his images have come from the soil and beaches of the Auckland region. There was at times a fault in his work of loose, careless improvisation. Lately Dr Sinclair had been producing less ebullient verse. Whatever saw the light of day was most carefully worked. One had the impression of iron hammered out cold and regretted a little the absence of an earlier fire. This new volume, however, can be regarded as a personal and literary triumph for Dr Sinclair, for fire (and ice) and careful workmanship are together present in it. Many of the poems celebrate, both nearly and remotely, the power of that antipodean Venus who troubles and revives us all. Such a theme is neither strange nor new, but the poet’s complex honesty is a clear sign of a new strength and maturity –

Marriages were not made in unexplored
Rain forests, but in family-sized frames
Designed by soft-voiced child psychologists
As play-rooms for the young, for family men
Male lawnmowers, home plumbing kits, beer mugs.
There is not any place within their walls
page 666 Where love’s harsh cry will not disturb a sleep.
Parental loving wears the mask of love . . .

Dr Sinclair has isolated the painful centre in New Zealand social life from which so many tensions, rebellions and calamities originate: a domestic pattern which forbids by its very nature, the full functioning of the adults who come together to form it.

Though the best poems in this book are straight love poems (I have not quoted from them, since it would be unsuitable to dismember them), the most interesting in the light of possible further development are those in which Dr Sinclair holds up an ironic mirror to suburbia. The irony is tempered with grief and tenderness. In these poems Dr Sinclair binds together the intuitions that were separate strands in his earlier work, and establishes his right to be regarded as one of the few New Zealand writers who understand the country they were born in.

1964 (314)