Why Ration Passion?

Of the seven poems by five poets in this Broadsheet one only is a love poem. That may be indicative of nothing more than disinclination, or of the existence of a Society for Mutual Nail Biting.

He has already used the sea metaphorically: "The sea is passion . . ." The inference could be left to the reader, otherwise the lines seem an apology for a poetic failure.

"Strife." by Ralph Unger, uses the moth-candle motif but it breaks under the strain and I was as relieved as Mr. Unger when he finally, "revelled in the warm light."

a's poem has this opening line, "For us the far journey." I didn't have to travel far before I came to a dead end. It is more of a posture than a poem and I would say rather than, "all the flowers smell of the past" that, "all the flowers smell very much like dead geraniums." a disappoints me; Terence Tiller at least listens to the death wind from a double bed.

Brian Bell's "Rumdangle Squelch" is good nonsense verse,

"I've heard he did the same to me."
The mutual friend replied,
As he poured the tea all down the sink
And drank from the pipe outside."

"Phoenix," by Bruce McLeod differs from the other poems. It is longer and it is didactic, both unusual characteristics in modern verse. He achieves his point by cleverly posing the consequences of its non-observance.

"Or . . . lose reason in customary servitude
And passion in the habitual interaction of somnolent flesh
While tormented memory plagues us with the stings of broken scorns."

Mr. McLeod has a gift for pinning the spinning epithetical stars and shining them in our eyes: "merchant scientist." "patched security." But these summary generalisations are splayed like tickertape around us and we cease to wonder. To quote Cecil Day-Lewis—"The human scene is not altogether, as we too often reflected it, a charade or a twitching marionette show, nor the human soul a mere spring of pusillanimity in the midst of a trackless jungle." There are after all MacNeice's, "people who vindicate the species." I feel Mr. McLeod has made far too much of the charade and scarcely vindicated himself.

Brian Bell's story is about a country bumpkin who stuck a pitchfork through his old man's neck. Mr. Bell says. "Unfortunately he was slightly sub-normal." The story needs pruning; the casual style too often becomes the careless style. Parts of this story are far too naive: "At the table one day the father looked at Muriel, the eldest daughter, and observed that she was now a big girl." These realisations I know come suddenly but had she been away for a long holiday in the big, bad city? It all ties up tidily. But wasn't Leo a queer cove?