Whether the will is free

Reviewed by Linda Roddick

C. K. Stead

Publisher: Payes.

Published by Pauls Book Arcade, 67 pp. 12/6.

There is little discernible technical development from beginning to end in spite of the fact that the divisions into parts relate to the poet's travels to Australia and Britain and thus show some degree of chronological sequence.

It is misleading for the reviewer to assign any hard-and-fast definitions to a systematic and conclusive devotion on Mr. Stead's part to the theme implied by the title of the collection, although it is possible to find in Part II a rejection of the physical scale of references always present in Part I. The accepted certainties of nature's laws, the strong "forge and metal of the will." give way in favour of a broader metaphysical plane where nature is still used, but as an Integral part of the figurative techniques, as metaphor where before it was simile.

The position of the verb in the seventh line is striking, and intentionally so: It is the nature of his "I am." the extent to which It is bound to both the physical and the human environment, whether in fact the will is free, that the poet seeks to know. Various poems deal with aspects of the bondage: love or even the memory of a now dead relationship ("Unexpected Meeting") or childhood ("And Could He Now"). All are sensitively and selectively handled so that the orchestra-tional density of the past gives colour and pattern, never confusion, to the present of the poem's creation.

("Whether The Will Is Free").

The ultimate in striving is seen in the topical "Four-Minute Miler"; here the final futility of self-conscious search is shown both explicitly. In the closing lines ("All bunted man hunts with him the dear thing He shall not find") and Implicitly. In the choice of the professional manner as subject.

If any conclusion is reached in the book It is in "A Natural Grace" where "by a blind process" the uncalculated. Intuitive act, without which all striving is useless, beauty, art and personality are created. And while this may appear as a retrograde step, emotionally speaking, from the "commanding love" of "Night Watch In The Tararuas." in another sense it is the step necessary to complete the circle and to create perfection. This has its poetic correlative in the farmer's reunion with the land ("Elegy") and in larger terms, in the poet's return in Part IV to New Zealand: "The bent world's end or just beginning" ("The Fijian Police Band In Albert Park").

The poems live in the sense and sound of few words in, for instance, the picture of the dog in

"Whether The Will Is Free."

"A hopper on the snow Wanting wings, or shoes, he goes Spring-lull as hope, and quivering

An arrow nose at frozen trees."

Nowhere does the sense compression become precious, although that is a tendency it narrowly escapes in the same poem, where "foot needled for warmth pines stamping the hills."

The imagery, which is more literary than pictorial, is often striking and always carefully achieved. Some images recur (rain, birds). The birds have a Yeatsian quality. While Stead's birds are not part of such a vast comprehensive image of spiritual unity, they symbolise in such poems as "Suppose The Bird" and "A Natural Grace" a similarly intense, unconscious happiness" and order it is interesting to note the striking likeness between Stead's "black-souled crows flap, on slow wings, into the downward sun" and Yeats's "ravens of unresting thought: flying and crying to and fro cruel claw and hungry throat" ("The Two Trees').

All the poems have a strong unity of sound and sense, both closely wrought and beautiful.