The Unknown Place

Mr Ward is not young, though this is his first collection. Like Charles Doyle, Peter Bland, and no doubt several other writers whose work has not yet reached the public ear, he is a new New Zealander, an expatriate Englishman living in this country, whose formative years belonged elsewhere. Yet nothing provokes poetry more, by an equal sense of arrival and exile, than the experience of immigration – for some it may stand for the final and deferred initiation into adult knowledge and solitude. Thus, when the votes are cast, perhaps without need, whether such poets are New Zealanders, my own view will be an emphatic affirmative – there is always a major element in their work which belongs to New Zealand, and that is the deciding factor. In Raymond Ward’s verse, England is the old place, the starting-point, an occasion for wintry meditations on themes of mortality, interspersed with statements of the crude page 11 urban vigour that lacks a past –

No one cares much what she thinks,
Her surly husband and family of three.
She’s just the force that feeds them,
Mismanages the place and smacks them clean;
The soft centre of a sweet so big
They all can have an extra bite.

I quote from ‘Friday Shopping’, a poem comparable with the best of Peter Bland’s work. The next poem in the book deals with arrival in this country, probably in Auckland –

. . . against a clear and moonless sky
the unfinished profile of the mountain
turns benignly from its own reflection;
what may to some men once have been a god,
commanding sacrifice commands no more . . .

One observes the tendency, dominant among the immigrant poets, to see New Zealand through a mythological lens – as the unknown place, the subconscious arena, where pagan myths lie near to the surface of the mind. Mr Ward’s control of language is more than adequate. His problem is to find the material most significant to him, and, curiously enough, I think he does his best in his six ‘adaptations’ from Durrell, MacNeice, Belloc, Betjeman and Auden, as if the methods of other men, used half-humorously, had given him an exact focus on what could be called his own New Zealand. One would hope for and expect a further development in knowledge.

1966 (379)