A Poet’s Garden

Somebody recently told me of an old Chinese saying, to the effect that a painting is a voiceless poem, and a poem is a vocal picture. I find it useful as a compass or theodolite in making a tentative survey of the interior world of Ruth Dallas. In some respects her last book of verse, The Turning Wheel, exhibited a break-through both in a freer, looser use of language and an exploration of various human relationships – whereas this new book seems at first glance more conservative, and represents a planting and settlement of ground already broken in.

It would be easy (though most unfair) to damn the book with faint prose simply because most of the poems it contains are fragile and perfect as a display of bone china; but the book gains by re-reading, and there are several factors which must modify this first and superficial impression. As in a picture of a garden (by Rousseau, let us say) that seems at first uninhabited, one discovers by degrees animals, birds and faces among the leaves, so these poems spring more and more to life:

Sometimes when I grow weary of cubes and planes,
Rectangles, cylinders, squares, gables,
And the greyness of the grey city stain,
I remember tall goldenrod and Michaelmas daisies
Swinging under bees in your country garden,
And most of all, fat dogs about your doorstep lying
Stretched a whole day in the sun.

Your house seems rooted deeply as its heavy trees
That check the unchecked wind. It breathes
Quietly, like a sleeper, or the bulrushes
page 116 That stand tuned to carry the melancholy cry
Of waterfowl and clear lake sounds . . . .

The vision is entirely the poet’s own; and it is the technical perfection of her work that makes it memorable and penetrating. One has only to compare a poem like this with almost any work one is likely to see in our local periodicals to recognise, perhaps with a shock, that one is here in contact with a perfected style. From the technical point of view some of the poems (‘Frost at Night’, ‘The Sea’, ‘Song for a Guitar’, ‘September’, ‘Spring Day’, ‘Night Piece’, ‘Fields in Midsummer’, ‘Winter Dusk’) are highly experimental; and perhaps inevitably these particular poems are, with a couple of exceptions, the most static in mood, the nearest to being vocal pictures. Some of the less perfect are the ones that move me most. I have a private preference, no doubt, for the familial and personal; and there are several of this kind in the book. I doubt if any of us could write so many good poems in a single year.

1966 (406)