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Salient. Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 42 No. 6. April 2 1979

Burning the Ivy

Burning the Ivy

Drawing of a woman on a ladder against a bookcase

The dominant theme of Burning the Ivy, particularly in the first half of the book, is the past; a past that cannot be exorcised. Ivy is cut back and burned, but the "vines will grip again, cannot be kept out". Move house, and the reprieve of change is brief: "those gross abstracts we can't dispose / Of. .. arrive with the morning milk". Turn to the future, find it informed by death:

"It is a nameless season of small mourning the heart keeps every day that comes"

Predictably, the season most often named named is Winter, or else Autumn. Even late Summer is "a parched garden so sparse of flowers / It seems winter". Look for "yesterday's warm shadows" — that other, desired, past — and taste "only merest / evariescences / of those first berries ..."

The book's middle poems suggest change from pessimism to something at least stoical if not almost hopeful. The secret is, not unexpectedly, engrossing work. For the time it took to cut his ivy he forgot all that gnawed his "present self". Now, the gardener in the poem of that name "stares up ... / past space he is patient will brighten from solstice / into equinox". And: "I rake the slats of the fire basket / for whatever embers, glad".

And yet, even when his degenerate muse gets him to see the seasons through his window and claim each as his own,

". . . Always the glass clouds over . . . from the sigh of joy."

Nothing startingly new about all this; but the poems are clean and well-made. And there are some lovely images; the tracking down of a poem, for instance:

"... sense elusive lines Lift like otter-skin, sleek pelts in the glistening Dark."

Derek Wallace