Salient. Newspaper of the Victoria University Students' Association. Vol 42 No. 6. April 2 1979
Burning the Ivy
Burning the Ivy
"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".
". . . Always the glass clouds over . . . from the sigh of joy."
"... sense elusive lines Lift like otter-skin, sleek pelts in the glistening Dark."
Derek Wallace