Uncollected poems
By: R.A.K. Mason ; edited by Roger Hickin ; with an introduction by Robert McLean
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Cold Hub Press
Published: 2019
Place of publication: Lyttelton, New Zealand
Language: eng
Number of pages: 163
ISBN-13: 9780473487355
Copyright date: 2019
Work titles: Poems
Description: Allen Curnow called R. A. K. Mason (1905-71) New Zealand's `first wholly original, unmistakably gifted poet'. His Collected Poems, first published in 1962, was a rigorous selection made before Mason's `late flowering' of 1962-65. Some of the excluded poems and some of the late poems have since seen the light of day in two biographies, but many are published here for the first time, drawn mostly from the papers of the Mason archive at the Hocken Collections, University of Otago, in Dunedin. Reviewing No New Thing in Folios of New Writing in 1941 William Plomer described Mason's poems as `gloomy, sexy and sardonic'. Curnow in the Christchurch Press spoke of their `keen wit, salted by suffering'. To Roderick Finlayson (Landfall 99) they were `like those Spanish songs whose strong harsh cries are disconcerting to some ears, but which pierce a receptive heart with sharp compassion'. Mason's humanity and integrity were also expressed in pro-labour and pacifist `propaganda poems' which featured in the New Zealand Communist Party newspaper, the People's Voice, and three of these from 1939 are included in this selection, along with the verse script for the 1943 dance-drama `China'."--Publisher description.
Table of contents: title: Introduction by Robert McLean; title: 1920s-1930s. 'Death came in quest of me' ; On a golden crucifix ; On Christ ; Charity ; 'Jolly little Judas came jogging up to Calvary ; 'Men took a deathless tale of mighty love' ; Gaudeo Quod Nescio ; Progress ; ejected in defeat from having nothing to assault ; The dismissal ; Epigrams ; 'Now fatherless and fruitless' ; The song of a lone garrison ; Stray thoughts beyond good and evil ; 'I cried out in the wilderness' ; Four Fragments ; 'Tick tock old clock-' ; 'We my body sick, you'd come to me and say' ; 'Lord Lord I am white with standing at the helm' ; 'Yu'll lie with late winter lilies in your hand' ; Blaiklock at the Judgement of Bacchus ; Ad regem ; 'Place a branch upon the grave' ; To one who offered consolation ; Carelles content ; 'Does not your sluggard pulse redouble' ; From the Greek ; 'I have been within the gates' ; Failure; title: 1938-1960. Service for the fallen ; This dark will lighten ; Skull on silence ; An ode praising her conscience ; 'Had there been two other wise men in the land' ; 'Here on this barren hill I wring a crust' ; China ; The unpardonable sin ; He got his timber at last ; In time of testing ; The writer to his wife ; A hundred thousand blessings ; 'Stone and steel is Scotland'; title: 1960s. Song for Dunedin ; Reunion ; Honey ; Poor prospector ; Ad miram ; 'Beware the mask, lest the mask become the man' ; Quand tu seras vieille ; Battle of the sexes ; outhful experiment ; After Atom bomb ; From the French ; The forest ; The singing and the silence ; New Zealand all over ; 'Be on your way, my man, she said' ; Pole-entrenched the southern streamer' ; 'Do we not wrong our dead' ; 'Up the hill with the sea-gulls skirling' ; 'I cannot see beyond this one clear end' ; Three stanzas translated from the mediaeval Latin of the Archpoet's 'Confession' ; Call off the cops ; Bags dog boat ; Against John Knox ; 'That was well bonded' ; All are one; title: Tailpiece. 'And this month will go in fear'.