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JAMES K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS Lawrence Jones
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Allen Curnow praised the early published poems because they showed that Baxter 's imagination sought 'forms as immediate in experience as the island soil under his feet', but that quality actually only slowly emerges. In the poems of 1941 images from Brighton and from Central Otago begin to appear, although unidentified: the rocks and waves of Brighton Bay, the sounds near the Brighton River - the croak of the bullfrogs and 'the far-off beat of the sea', the 'dry shingle- plain' near a lake. By 1942-43, local places and experiences are taking definite form as Baxter writes about this 'land of sombre hills and streams', composes a Worsdworthian first version of the poem that will become 'Wild Bees', or describes a glacier-wall or the weirs in the Leith. The 'Love-Lyrics' of 1944, some of which make it into Beyond the Palisade, are about love of the land, the almost sexual relationship being stated most explicitly in 'At Balclutha': . . . the land leans to me That I should praise her grace of form and feature, That I should laud her gesture and her glance. |
