Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University College, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 21, No. 3. April 1, 1958
The Night Shift, Baxter, Doyle, Johnson, and Smithyman (Capricorn Press, 10/-)
The Night Shift, Baxter, Doyle, Johnson, and Smithyman (Capricorn Press, 10/-).
O broken bands are strong to grasp the thunder.
O give her compassion; my weakness tears
Her loveliness apart whom I need whole.
And the heart remembers, whips its waters white in a grief for absence of his sky-blue laughter.
Play on me, dear my man,
My husbandman, untune
The bowling night.
Poetry cannot be described by the bookful; every poem needs a separate review. The best one can do is to say "This is worthy reading"—and it is. I found Baxter's "Songs of the Desert" (fourteen poems of love struggling to be creative), and Doyle's poems of suffering at the loss of love most rewarding, but all four contributors are fairly evenly competent and the appeal of one or other is a subjective matter.
Some of these verses are immediately luminous, some yield to concentration, some remain opaque save to the sharers of that experience, and perhaps with some there is nothing to be extracted after all. This is not great poetry, but it is good enough to repay the effort, often considerable, of comprehending it.