The Pocket Mirror

by Janet Frame

Frame hastily submitted a sheaf of poems to her American publisher Braziller in the sixties, producing the only volume of poetry published in her lifetime, "The Pocket Mirror."

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

The fate befalling the young woman who wanted "to be a poet" has been well documented. Desperately unhappy because of family tragedies and finding herself trapped in the wrong vocation (as a schoolteacher) her only escape appeared to be in submission to society's judgement of her as abnormal. She spent four and a half years out of eight years, incarcerated in mental hospitals. The story of her almost miraculous survival of the horrors and brutalising treatment in unenlightened institutions has become well known. She continued to write throughout her troubled years, and her first book (The Lagoon and Other Stories) won a prestigious literary prize, thus convincing her doctors not to carry out a planned lobotomy.

She returned to society, but not the one which had labelled her a misfit. She sought the support and company of fellow writers and set out single-mindedly and courageously to achieve her goal of being a writer. She wrote her first novel (Owls Do Cry) while staying with her mentor Frank Sargeson, and then left New Zealand, not to return for seven years.

Reviews

[Rebecca]

I read the first 22 pages of 121. Having read from Frame’s fiction and memoirs, I wanted to dip into her poetry as well. This collection of free verse from 1967 is mostly written in the first person and concerns everyday local sights and sounds: beaches, town scenes, the view out the window of a morning, and so on; some are short while others are rambling. However, there are also several poems of death and war, and a particular obsession with napalm. While there’s nothing especially off-putting about these poems, nor are they very compelling in style or theme.

[R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The front page of this library book is stamped in red ink "July 1967" so, yeah, I'm grateful it was available. A slender volume, the type which that oft is amongst those tossed these days from the general collection to make room for rheumy-gloomy rhymey-whiny slop.

Absolutely a gem - and the best honor I could give it is just repeating the blurb from the flap: "Miss Frame is a witch-novelist who stirs her plots under a full moon and has various magic powers." (Wilfred Sheen, New York Times Book Review)

I mean, yeah, this isn't a novel but, damn, now I want to track down more of her stuff.

[M · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Chrysalids

As a child not more sensitive than others
I used to pick the gray-walled chrysalids
for fishing bait, and afterwards feast well
on the rainbow and brown trout my father caught.
Now, exiled from the crawling flying creatures
that once mistook my hair for red shrubbery,
barley grass, a mossy forest, I feel compassion
for the world I robbed. I remember those windowless
gray houses of sober unusual design;
hanging dungeons dependent on the frail
life-security of attachment to leaves;
houses with walls gray-folded, pleated
like the robes of monks; frayed hairshirts,
old sackcloth sealed at top and tail; dull
colonies and clusters that never showed light;
deep shelters with the occupants, asleep,
unable to receive or comprehend
the wildfire rumor spreading from red leaf
to red leaf that the world was nearing its end,
that a new world, in seclusion, was being made complete.
I did not know. I would never have believed
that every house I stole contained a jewel.
I gathered them as if they had been overripe fruit,
I thought their mud-colored walls withered
and ugly and useful only for fishing bait.
And now I feel compassion. Is it too late
to soften to a new shape and dimension the hard truth
that parallel worlds must never meet?

[Pringles · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great poetry

[Arfi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just a lovely book packed with wonderful poems and poetries with beautiful minds. NZ made.

[Jared · Rating 5 out of 5]

The petal-white
dunedin light