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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Personal Issues

page 390

Personal Issues

Too long ago to be comfortable about it I bought A.L. Rowse’s first book of verse. I recall that it had the quality of a late frozen spring, with introspective couplets that brooded on death and human isolation and the landscape of Cornwall, the product very possibly of a late and frozen adolescence. It is pleasing to read Rowse’s fifth book of verse (I have not read the intervening ones) and notice its quality of humanity and warmth and a craftsmanship that is almost urbane – though the poet does remark in his brief and pungent preface, ‘A lifetime is a life, not the less authentic for being consistent with itself at different periods. In the secrecy of poetry it is possible to write one’s innermost autobiography’.

These words imply that poems can be candid in a way the life cannot; and when I first read them I unconsciously substituted ‘lie’ for ‘life’ – perhaps an indication of the effect Rowse’s poems had on me, as if there were masks behind masks still hiding the deep inner sensitivity of his first poems. Rowse is a poetic relative of such men as Edmund Blunden, meticulous examiners of nature and the social scene, above all Englishmen carrying a wound of self-distrust and lifelong reticence. It seems likely to me that he has learned something from the work of the American poet Robert Lowell, in particular the ability to state personal issues through impersonal media:

In the late afternoon of my life I lie and doze
In the residents’ lounge of the hotel at Lytham St. Anne’s,
The candid sun full on my February face
White and drawn with long winter’s overwork.
Behind me the silvery chime of a Victorian clock
Tinkles the afternoon tea-time hours away . . . .
Slowly the sun goes down behind the bank
Of low nimbus cloud over the grey waters.
The tide is on the turn and inward comes
Darkness and the ice-cold winter sea.

Here I quote the beginning and end of ‘St. Anne’s-on-the-Sea’, a poem as good as any of Lowell’s Life Studies, with a perfect handling of free blank verse, contrasting temporary social comfort with the absolute force of imminent death. The poems written in America are also good, but not as good as this, where Rowse unquestionably stands on his home ground. There is also a magnificent cat-poem which I recommend to all who love, as I do, those unique and delightful animals.

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