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THE
MYTHOLOGY OF PLACE:
JAMES
K. BAXTER'S OTAGO WORLDS
Lawrence Jones
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Brighton World |
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Page 47
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| Such poems exhibit clearly the qualities that Curnow
had praised, and Otago images are frequent in the remainder of the poems
of the 1940s. They become less frequent in the poems written in Wellington
in the 1950s and early 1960s, although in person sometimes or in
memory more often Baxter returns to Otago 'to get back a full sight of
loss', to be 'Delivered from a false season / To the natural winter of
the heart'. That 'imaginary journey over the neck of
Big Rock' is especially evident in the Pig Island Letters poems
of the early 1960s. The poems of the Burns Fellowship years and those immediately
following, the poems written between 1966 and 1969, are, naturally enough,
full of Otago images taken direct from life as well as from memory (or,
sometimes, from the interplay of the two), used in a more mature way than
in the early poems. In the last years a new iconcography and mythology
arises from Jerusalem and to a lesser extent Wellington and Auckland.
What turned out to be the last act in the mythic drama of self was
acted out before a different landscape and different cityscapes and with
different tribes, drug addicts and social drop-outs rather than his Gaelic
ancestors or his bohemian drinking friends. The Otago images recur, however,
when Baxter remembers Eden, 'the rocks at MacKenzie's corner / Where the
river and the road both take a sharp turn', or when he dreams of
'Lazy swimming greenbone', or when he meditates on his father's death and
thinks of 'the demon- / hearted breakers and the worn / elbows of seastone'.
Certainly many of his strongest and most characteristic poems start with
Otago images, often giving Baxter that 'reality prior to the poem', the
'New Zealand referent', the 'contact with base' that Curnow thought that
he needed. They are an integral part of the material
from which he weaves a coherent poetic myth inclusive of and greater than
his individual poems, one of the great imaginative creations of New Zealand
literature. |
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