Author's Foreword: ... It seemed to me convenient to group what remained of the poems from my first two books, Green Lions and The White Cry, under the heading "Early New Zealand Poems"; and it was tempting to place with those, as I have done, a few nostalgic poems about my native land written during my first two or three years in Sydney: chiefly the title poem from "Elegy for an Airman" (1940) and "The River" (which was originally entitled "The Waingongoro", only nobody in Australia could pronounce that) which made its appearance in book form as late as 1946 in The Dosser in Springtime - however I think it was written some years before that. ...
One natural but disturbing result of omitting these wartime poems was, I discovered, that the selection then began to give the impression that the vast historical events of our time had made no impact on me at all: which was far from the truth. For this reason, among others, I have included a poem called 'The Breaking Wave' which does mention that there were such things as bombers and submarines disturbing our peace of mind; ..I suppose that on the whole my reaction to the violence of our time has been chiefly expressed, by image and implication, in the verse plays and Glencoe.
Partly for that reason, and partly because I do not think that in their merits and defects, they can reasonably be separated from the rest of my poetry, I have included here extracts from each of the plays. ... Finally, the selection is more up to date than either the Collected Poems or the small Selected Poems in the Australian Poet series. (v-vi).
