Mike Crowl's Music - The World Premieres of Some of my Music:
Some brief biographies of the poets whose work
was used in my concert.
| Ruth Dallas was born in Invercargill in 1919.
Her earliest poems appeared in the Southland Times, and she subsequently
published a number of books of poems between the fifties and the late seventies.
She now lives in Dunedin with her neice. She is still regarded as one of New Zealand's finest poets. The poems I used came from a group called, Six Songs, from the collection entitled The Turning Wheel.
Donald McDonald's poem The Hills appeared in New Zealand Farm and Station Verse, collected by A E Woodhouse, and published by Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd 1950. A reprint was made in 1967. McDonald has a number of poems in this collection, and a short bio, as follows: McDonald was educated at Agricultural High School, Fielding, where he read much poetry, particularly A E Houseman, whose influence is evident in some of his work. With his brother he took up land at Ngaroma, near Te Awamutu, previously settled and later abandoned by returned servicemen of the 1914-18 war. He left the farm in January 1940 for service overseas. He was in Fiji for seven months, then North Africa. He was wounded at Sidi Reszegh, and from hospital wrote the verses, Sidi Reszegh, enclosed in letter to his mother. He rejoined his battalion, but was taken prisoner at El Alamein. Tragically he was killed in an Italian vessel torpedoed in Mediterranean, 1942, at the age of thirty-one. He is buried in Southern Greece. After his death, his mother found many verses scribbled on scraps of paper and in old exercise books. These were collected and published by his former school: In remembrance of Old Boys fallen in the War and in memory of the Author, Donald McDonald.
Ursula Bethell 'Her preoccupation with time and the natural world owes more to religious considerations than romantic ones.' [Oxford Companion to NZ Literature] Bethell lived from 1874 till 1945, but wrote most of her poetry in a ten-year period later in her life. She was an active Christian lady, performing social work and, at one time, living in an Anglican community in England. Vincent O'Sullivan calls her 'the most firmly, traditionally Christian' of NZ poets.
James K Baxter is almost too well-known for me to say anything more about him. However, his slightly quirky and humorous children's poems are probably less familiar to many adults than his other works, even though they have been published in at least three different editions. Hone Tuwhare, who recently celebrated his 86th birthday, mostly lives in Kaka Point, in South Otago these days. He has published many books of poetry, and is one of NZ's best-loved poets. His style ranges from slang-based poems like Sun O (2) to wondrously lyrical love poems and poems celebrating life. (I'm sure there must be a poem called Sun O (1), but if there is, I haven't seen it.) Stan Boyle I haven't been able to discover a thing about this poet. Worse, I no longer even know what collection of poems I originally found Autumn Morning in, though I suspect it was one of those books in which the poems were the entries for a competition.
Christina Rosetti. Rosetti is the only poet whose words I've used who isn't a New Zealander or isn't regarded as a NZ poet. Her poems are full of religious imagery and a deep seriousness.
I know nothing about either Kathleen Hawkins or Dora Hagemeyer. Their poems appeared in Spirit in a Strange Land, an anthology published in 2002, a Godwit Book published by Random House. |