Jumping from a Crumbling Building.

If you saw me going down the street today
I would seem the picture of private innocence
but don't be fooled
When Wellington has switched off, black night,
I sneak with the skill of possoms
out to your place
and stare through your bedroom window,
the heart wobbling as I watch
your heaving chest,
your darling lips closed to keep the dream warm, closed,
but not, I hope, like your heart,
which is like a small blanket
held at the corners by four brave strangers, since
when I fall
it must be open.

— Martin Doyle

Poem to Lins

— late at night — edging about with a torch —
and then climbing up the gravel track
under observation from the trees
leaving behind the sinister that-doesn't-belong-here scent of aniseed
rising in the warn air,

and the curious glint of tinfoil.
Me in bed,
you waiting for a steel pipe
and a broken skull,
not even the sublimity of unexpected death.
you were not murdered by opossum extremists
during an internal power struggle;
you were not transfixed by a spear as you and a friend
studied each other's eyes in the dark.
you were killed by a boy who wanted your skin.

'he was a simple person,
a freebooter interested in trees,
one who collected berries for their own
peculiar beauty,
a student of the night who tried to grasp
Tane's soul in his own small claws'
I remember the softness of your plump body
lying on the grass,
and a wet muzzle flashing in the morning sun.
There is only a skin nailed to my wall.

— Martin Doyle

The Occupying Forces. Jennifer Maiden.

Published by Makar Press. 1975.

Lament for Ariadne. Rachel McAlpine. Caveman Press. 1975

Reviewed by Judith Ting

Jennifer Maiden's new book, 'The Occupying Forces' is essentially a mosaic of poetry, each piece vibrant, complete, the whole capable of evoking a surprising variety of sympathetic response from the reader.

infuses the reader with both physical and mental perceptions - one has the impression that the poetess is totally aware.

Yet moods evoked are not always extensive, universal. A poem like 'The Novelist' is able to pinpoint a particular feeling concisely, exactly, and 'Kriegspiel' is an outstanding poem, in that while it is controlled by a firm evocation of sensation, there is a separation of mood from consciousness - feeling is almost intellectualised, compacted until it becomes little more than just another form of colour, a part of the game itself.

Ultimately this is a vital book. Jennifer Maiden is able to maintain consistently the intense pulse of emotion necessary to valid lyrical poetry, and even more importantly to communicate this quality to her readers. The Occupying Forces' is a book which should be read.

Not so, however, with Rachel McAlpine's 'Lament for Ariadne.' Essential to this book's particular genre of poetry is the ability to contain impression by creating through a series of swift, vivid images the basis of a complete scene. Obviously these images should combine to present an harmonious whole, yet throughout much of the book connection between images is only tenuous. There is no sense of unity, and consequently an inability to evoke any responsive feeling of the type that makes poetry cogent.

In 'Incident at King Arthur's Court' particularly, words seem to be used as separate units, not as harmonious segments of the whole.

"I'm happy for you both
feel free
he stays
and leaves
and comes again to say
it all again."

The reader is not left with a communicated sensation of sparse barren reality, merely with an impression of empty verse. Even the initial off-hand mockery is not valid - to mock successfully one must mock more than cardboard characters, and the three protagonists are very flat and incomplete.

Technically also the poems are lacking. Without the veneer of efficacious imagery, the bare bones of the structure protrude to a form-marring degree.

"we rise
from a wrinkled sea
to a wrinkled sky
ripped from a friend

I do not cry" - Phrases like these annoy, and do not succeed in performing their office. On the whole, the book appears to be merely pretentious.