Fire Without Phoenix : Preface : An Attitude for a New Zealand Poet


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To Charles Brasch In Praise of Violence Preface An Attitude for a New Zealand Poet Part One Sleep Will Come Singly • A Ballad of Bad Omens • The Tempest • Sea Legend • Fire Without Phoenix • The Time of the Eagle • And I, In Arcady • The Beachcomber • For One Flying • A Handful of Sea Shells • A Figure at the Window • Island Part Two Ceremony of Pain • Dream • Soldier's Pay • Monastic Ruins • A Performance of Death & The Maiden • At a Holy Well • From a Train in the Midlands • In Radcliffe Square, Oxford • The Streets of My City • In the Fields of My Father's Youth • Colophon—The Poet to his Book Source: Oliver, W. H., Fire Without Phoenix: Poems 1946-1954. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1957 Electronic source: Fire Without Phoenix: a TEI-conformant transcription All poems © W. H. Oliver	An Attitude for a New Zealand Poet Leaving unto your little clan — Great verse? The clan may recognise Forty years on its road to paradise In a bitter word embedded in your line The knife you sharpened on your private bone, Still sharp and smoking, keen to cauterise Our self-inflicted wounds, to agonise A solemn race to greet its proper pain. But will it? Do not ask. To know Either your impotence or dreadful strength Is more than you could stand. Contented, go Echoing, aching with a social death Which none but you can entertain the length Of six tall feet of singing bone, or earth.