"My Best Effort"

My mention of Wordsworth, of course, places me precisely, and shows the readers of Salient (non-literary issue) that I have no qualifications to review its annual literary brother. I am told (page 6) that a knowledge of Wordsworth makes me out of date and any knowledge of the early T. S. Eliot merely underlines my shallow pretentions of modernism. And when I am assured (page 10) that after all I belong to the class of "dry and static university specialists" who have no direct contact with life, I realise (and hope he realises) the great error the editor of non-literary Salient made in asking me to write this review. Sorry, boys, I can do only my best.

What I cannot understand in all this atmosphere of inspissated gloom (Milton, a dead poet) is where it all comes from. I think I know most of the writers, pleasant and personable young men and women—though a few of them I must say [unclear: to] getting on in years to be writing for an undergraduate paper. I have met them all sober and enjoyed their company. Some of them I have met drunk and enjoyed that even more. On paper, however, the Hyde appears through the engaging feature of the Jekyll and altogether Salient Literary number seems almost a classic case of literary and cultural schizophrenia. Beats me.

Of the Individual writers Baxter continues to keep the unchallenged place he has among the poets; Jocelyn Henrid is getting somewhere; Louis Johnson (in these poems at least, for he has done excellent work) nowhere very much: Charles Doyle you should keep your eye on. The editor John Cody and B. J. Cameron write pontifically in the best Landfall manner, Louis Johnson rattles whatever a poet-critic has in place of a sabre and makes frightful faces at Curnow (who appears to have been making faces at him, only I don't keep up much with Here and Now, finding it more like There and Then). Dennis Garrett and Susan Rhind write with sense and moderation on films and music and the irrepressible James Baxter in his Notes towards an Aesthetic shows that he can handle prose as well as poetry.