Clive,
There is a sculptural grandeur to these poems. While I do sincerely admire them I confess I experience a simultaneous annoyance that traces back to my pioneering New Zealand roots where real art was masculine and born out of the struggle with the land. Katherine Mansfield was a flicker of hope but the calloused hand controlled the gates to heaven. Fairchild seems to be such a poet.
He is splendid. I recognise that.
Janet
PS: This quotation...
We are at the Bargello in Florence, and she says
what are you thinking? And I say, beauty, thinking
of how very far we are now from the machine shop
and the dry fields of Kansas, the treeless horizons
of slate skies and the muted passions of roughnecks
and scrabble farmers drunk and romantic enough
to weep more or less silently at the darkened end
of the bar out of, what else, loneliness, meaning
the ache of thwarted desire, of, in a word, beauty,
or rather its absence, and it occurs to me again
that no male member of my family has ever used
this word in my hearing or anyone else’s except
in reference, perhaps, to a new pickup or dead deer.
...struck a familiar chord. I wrote this scrap from a poem for my own father some years ago. Wiley Clements published it:
Beauty, a word my father never used,
suffused my dad out there amidst the frost
as he recalled his childhood on the farm
and grieved for all those days of freedom lost.
[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited March 11, 2006).]
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