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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Close to Nature

Close to Nature

There are many critics of poetry who state or imply that poetry is a natural growth, the product of heart and mind working in unison upon their proper occasions – for example, the response of a child to the green enclosure of native bush, of a man or woman, after absence, to a beloved person. One need not deny that first poems are often of this kind; but it seems that symbolism, which is the life of full-grown poetry, occurs when the natural vision has been shattered by a second Fall, and the poet begins to try to piece the world together in a new synthesis. The sense experience no longer dictates to the poet; it becomes the cloak of his or her inward and actual drama.

These considerations may explain in part why Nan McDonald, a poet of considerable force, sensitivity and natural passion, has succeeded only rarely in any transmutation of her material –

Here are the grass-green slopes, the dark blue sea.
Simple and vivid as a child would choose.
And strung against them, red as the breaking earth
Along the cliff edge, the sleek shorthorns graze . . .

The unpretentious record of impressions is effective on its own level, admirably true to life. But compare it with any poem by that equally unpretentious American, Robert Frost. For him, the apparently spiritual drama finds expression in the image of the ‘frozen groundswell’ of the earth underpage 232 a stone wall dividing farm from farm. For Nan McDonald, the record is the poem. The natural world, in a suburban garden or on the Australian coast, confronts her as friend and enemy, the occasion to write a poem that ends by praising God. From her work, the most genuine and precious of its kind, one begins to divine the reasons why Australian poetry so infrequently rises above the level of its sentimental ballad origins. There is nothing more unnatural than a great poem.

1955 (110)