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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 1, No. 13 June 29, 1938

N.Z. Verse — Fairburn's "Dominion"

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N.Z. Verse

Fairburn's "Dominion"

A month or so past the Caxton Press Issued "Dominion," poems by A. R. D. Fairburn, in five parts—Utopia; Album Leaves; Element; Dialogue; and Struggle in a Mirror. We have come to expect excellent printing from the Caxton Press: we are never disappointed.

Mr. Fairburn has, as usual, written some very fine poetry which deals, also as usual, almost exclusive with social problems. That is a pity. For while Mr. Fairburn is rapidly creating his own pecullar style of verse (he is certainly the leading New Zealand exponent of the methods he has adopted—Mr. Glover, on a slightly different line of attack, has not achieved the same measure of success) he is capable of making quite a different style, and a so much beter style, his own. Perhaps I should note here that I have not used pecullar in the popular sense.

So much of contemporary verse that is written "in the modern manner" is, unfortunately, just that and nothing else. Not so with Mr. Fairburn—he can and does, write poetry, and his use of the modern manner is excellently adapted for the sympathetic treatment of social problems. No doubt his poetry is influenced by his experience and impressions of New Zealand and of the life of her people to day—and yesterday. But surely even Mr. Fairburn has found some little beaury. For there is frequently beauty in the expression of his verses:

"Hearts posied at a star's height
Moved in a cloudless world
Like gulls aftoat above island,"

There is also striking origniality which justifles by its effectiveness its unorthodoxy:

". . . and those who keep
The records of decay.
Statisticians and archivists,
Turning the leaves with cold hands.
Computing our rain on scented cufix." And again:
". . . angels crying under the [unclear: coombled] arch of hearen.
Tongues of fire that shout, and fall in silence,
Learing the carbon copy of a world of words:
Black earth, stillness of ask: world of fact."

Yet in his subject-content there is seldom beauty.

Admittedly there are very grave and terrible social problems in New Zealand to-day, as elsewhere, but surely neither Mr. Fairburn nor anyone else can do very much about it by propaganda in their verse. And while it is not necessary to sing only in such terms as these:

"My love is like a dynamo
With women wire for hair. . . ."

as does Mr. Glover is reply to Miss Andrews' accusation in "To-morrow," that he. Mr. Fairburn and others adopt, without poetic success the view of these lines:

"We must away with trees and spring.
For stern reality's the thing. . . . ."

we can avoid that type of verse, unfortunately os common in New Zealand, that has provoked their attitude.

Mr. Fairburn is, of course, conscious of beauty, but his sense of the injustice of things is so strong that it will not let him write, in his own style, of the beauty in modernity (for there is at least a little there) as he so well could do. "Conversation in the Bush" betrays Mr. Fairburn as he could be—and as he would be.

When Mr. Fairburn forgets his bitterness, as in "Elements" (and only there) he mirrors that beauty of New Zealand in perfection—In poetry that makes the exile long for home, awaking vivid pictures of its landscape.

"Treading your wills drinking your waters.
Touchig your greenness, they are content.
Finding peace at the heart of strite
And a core of stillness in the whirlwind."

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