Three Poets

These little books of verse provide some immediate answer to the publisher’s problem of making the work of new poets quickly and cheaply available. But they are not wholly satisfactory in format. The typography, though clear, is undistinguished; the poems are too crowded; and the books have the appearance of impermanence.

Nancy Bruce’s poems express on the whole the kind of emotion that people feel on public occasions, reflecting rather what many New Zealanders think of their country than what that country is. The verses on Maori themes are perhaps too vaguely optimistic. One is tempted to suggest that the poet should take a trip up the Wanganui River, where the lands, homes, meeting houses, battlegrounds and graveyards of the Ngati Awa are soon to be drowned under an artificial lake so that our factories may have a little more electricity to make plastic toys – and then that she should write an exact documentary poem on the projected destruction of a longstanding community. That would command respect, and would not be beyond her quite real journalistic powers.

I suspect that shoddy models are to blame for certain languors and vaguenesses in Mr Parmée’s poetry. In his best poem, ‘The Pa’, one can distinguish the emergence of an elsewhere half-buried vision –

Hushed now the sentinel’s warning cry
And the harsh, nightbruising screams
Of those half-rising to die . . .

It gives one hope for Mr Parmée’s work in the future.

In some ways Patricia Godsiff has achieved the imagist goal of abstract statement in poetry. ‘Regatta’, ‘Moonlight Sonata’, ‘Drowned Girl’, ‘Sunflowers’, ‘Fishing Village’ – I feel that in these poems she is doing what a painter commonly does – presenting the observer with an apparently impersonal microcosm of reality. The formal quality of her work is not, I think, in doubt; it is her highly oblique approach which leaves me uncertain, for it could well lead to a mannered poetry of the shallows. There are parallels in American verse – Marianne Moore, for example, whose intricate brocadespage 685 have their own kind of vitality. Yet here too there is a side-stepping. If it is not to dry up, the natural movement of poetry is always towards depth, towards a subjective recognition of the primitive and uncivilised community which make up the sum of civilised life. It involves a shift from images to symbols. I feel that Patricia Godsiff has not yet fully come to grips with her subjective task. Yet one is grateful for the good poems she has already written.

1964 (329)