Uncollected poems

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.