South Into Winter:

Poems and Roadsongs by Sam Hunt. Published by Alister Taylor. Prace $2.95.

Reviewed by Janet Oakley

These are simple poems with an often depressing message. They are written in various places about different people around the country. In a rhythmic almost hypnotic metre Sam Hunt talks about death, love and cynicism in 30 short poems Sometimes the simplicity is so marked that the poems are trivial pop songs as in Modigliani Girl.

Denim blues
my mind a swirl
You drive me mad
my mod Modigli — mod
li — ani Girl.

The musical imagery is continued by reptative verses such as:

Daddy used to come
home every night

which is repeated 11 times in an 18 line poem. It begins to look less like poetry and suspiciously like space filling. In several poems the colloquial language and rhyming couplets sound like doggerel.

The poem that epitomises Hunt's wandering indiscipline is We Could Just Disappear:

We disappear
ten carriages of us
a tunnel as long as
tomorrow, next term
a tunnel as long as time

No one knows when
we will come out the other end
we could go on and on and
on forever and never
come out again
We could just disappear

There is no analysis or understanding in these poems just statements and situations. Hunt never stays long enough in one place to either understand or explain what he writes about. There is no depth in his poetry. They make pleasant reading but give no great insights.

The poems are published on two sheets of orange and two sheets of grey paper interspersed with several rather gloomy photos concertinared in a trendy purple folder that is already falling apart-hardly worth $2.95.