New Zealand Poets

Those who saw Mr Curnow’s play performed in 1948 at the Little Theatre, Canterbury College, and had read his verse, must have been doubtful before the play whether he had the versatility, the range of mood and capacity for making situations real which one requires from a good playwright. For Mr Curnow’s lyrical and metaphysical poetry is in the main symbolic and deeply introspective. But after the play they could have no doubts. Though naturally enough the finest passages were reserved for the choruses, this play stood on its own feet; the characters were convincing as types and men; and the ideas behind the play the product of a mature and intensely original mind. One cannot gain a full impression by reading it alone; but one can savour more fully the subtleties of the verse. The images are drawn from the natural environment in which the characters move – rock, water, fire, flesh and dust – the four elements with their innumerable variations. As Mr Curnow indicates in his preface, the speech takes at times ‘the colour of a translation for which there is no original.’

The theme of the play, the conversion by force and circumstances of an island people from paganism to Christianity, touches more than a raw- nerve of history. For most of us are at heart pagan, smarting under a half- comprehended Law. And like Numangatini, the converted King, when we accept the new dispensation we tend to use it for private ends. One gathers the impression that Mr Curnow, accepting the inevitability of its destruction, is fascinated by the old animistic paganism and prefers it to the new paganism that missionaries unwittingly carried with them – the Axe, symbol of sterile power. His enigmatic choruses express desolation rather than hope of a new synthesis.

I think the defeated dead are happier
Than the red-handed victor winding home,
Haunted by images of defeat and death.

Whatever one’s personal reaction may be, it is plain that Mr Curnow has written the best play to come out of New Zealand. When one considers that it was made in the brief leisure snatched from full-time occupation, one can only marvel at his creative powers.

Mr Campbell’s first book of poems, superbly printed on hand-made paper, is a volume for the bibliophile. And the extraordinary vitality and freshness of the work of this new poet should guarantee an enthusiastic reception. Plainly Mr Campbell is an inspired poet. The innocent sensuality of his love poems is reminiscent of the Keats of Endymion, an attractive lushness at times intractable to the verse form:

page 61

Warm heart, warm mouth,
Lie still, lie beautiful.
You have no need to stir
Anymore, today;
You have no other function to fulfil.

Here there is no hint of relationship: the girl is put in her place so that the poem may take its course. But the group of poems occasioned by the death of a friend in an alpine climbing accident is of a different kind. Mr Campbell assumes some of the stature of the Keats of Hyperion; and his grief is expressed in dithyrambic images where no phrase can be anticipated yet each phrase seems inevitable:

Now he is dead, who talked
Of wild places and skies
Inhabited by the hawk;

Of the hunted hare that flies
Down bare parapets of stone,
And there closes its eyes . . .

Of the Lion Rock that lifts
Out of the whale-backed waves
Its black sky-battering cliffs . . .

In the third group of poems, ‘The Cromwell Gorge’, one can observe the emergence of a new balance of thought and feeling, especially in ‘Hut Near Desolated Pines’, a poem where metaphor and idea, concrete and abstract, are welded together in harmony. The last poem in the book, ‘The Return’, develops a mythological theme without strain or grotesqueness.

The most remarkable feature of Mr Campbell’s poetry is a passionate sympathy with natural objects which produces at its strongest the effect of genuine animism. One must hope that no circumstances will fetter his poetic development or dull an insight which could make him the leading poet in this country.

For Mr Witheford the occasion for poetry springs directly from subjective conflict. Like Rimbaud, he may be regarded as an explorer with a creed and discipline primarily aesthetic, searching for some spiritual liberation. But these poems are the record of an endless approach ‘winding through tangled woods to that clear place’, static rather than dynamic. We may suspect that the ‘clear place’ is death; but the urgency of Mr Witheford’s search for meaning in what is for him an inhospitable universe invites our respect. With a finer texture than R.A.K. Mason, though without his force, he expressespage 62 the sense of anguish and impermanence in personal experience, laying bare, incidentally, the fatal dualism of love and death which underlies humanist culture. The fine invocation of the last poem –

Your patience bears the ruin of the world,
A grain of salt upon a sea-gull’s wing –

seems rather a last-ditch defiance of the powers of despair and sterility than a convincing affirmation. Technically these poems have the balanced smoothness that comes from a long apprenticeship. But it is difficult to see what new impulse could replace the unique excitement of a sense that can smell its own mortality. The most secure poem, ‘Alone,’ may point the way to a less autonomous symbolism. The wood-cuts by Mervyn Taylor, of that excellence which we have come to expect from him, reinforce and illustrate the mood of this remarkable book.

Though Arnold Wall is one of our most distinguished elder poets, the wisdom of this new edition of a 1912 sonnet series may be doubted. The progressive sentiments which then seemed natural ring a little false after two world wars. Only an occasional landscape sonnet reaches the standard of the poet’s maturer work.

1950 (42)