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JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS Lawrence Jones
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Page 27
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Those rocks between sea and beach obviously symbolise a kind of permanence that contrasts to the transitory flesh. 'The stubborn rocks withstand / The ebb and surge of grief'. Barney's Island is a presence reminding us of the limits of our technology and the small scale of our time: The island like an old cleft skull With tussock and bone needles on its forehead Lives in the world before the settlers came With gun and almanac. The poet preaches to the gulls from 'Barney's pulpit island side', and he feels most secure in his work when he is 'standing on the rock of real knowledge'. The fisherman on the rocks of Barney's Island becomes the image of the poet fishing into the unconscious to find the dark material for the poem: While loud across the sandhills Clangs out the Sunday bell I drop my line and sinker down Through the weed-fronded swell, And what I see there after dark Let the blind wave tell. I go on the beaches when the tide is low And fish for poems where my four
dead uncles,
Let down their lines from laps
of broken stone
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