The Poetry Imagery Of The Islander

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30682, 23 February 1965, Page 7

The Poetry Imagery Of The Islander

The island image is one of the finest things in New Zealand poetry and I think the finest flowering of it is in Allen Curnow’s “The Axe” and “Landfall in Unknown Seas.”

The order of material in “Landfall in Unknown Seas” seems parallel to the order of events in the growth of New Zealand verse, as traced by Curnow in his anthology in 1945, “A Book of New Zealand Verse, 1923-45.”

The first is verse written in New Zealand which might as well have been written in England because the writers of verse who came to New Zealand were English and all literature and culture to which they subscribed was English: what they were writing was neither one thing nor the other—a sort of imitation of English verse.

IMITATIONS The next stage consisted of imitations of that imitation written by people who had been born in New Zealand, or who had lived here while it was a European colony. They began to write that same romantic nostalgic verse, but using New Zealand words and names. The verse was getting a New Zealand reference. Then there was a time of experiment when all sorts of things were tried which seemed to have the twin aims of getting away from the old alien experience—alien because New Zealand experience was now seen as different from English Victorian experience— and of trying to write something that could not be written anywhere else. This is where the island came in. Up to this stage there had been a link of nostalgia between the emerging New Zealand and the left-behind culture of England. Here there is less of this and the writers of verse are conscious of themselves as islanders. Then comes transition into the fourth stage, where things are being said that could not be said anywhere else, but with themes that are universal. ARGUMENT

I think it is particularly interesting that in poems of his own that Curnow included in his anthology in 1945 the words “island” and “sea” keep cropping up and that "islandness” is essential to his argument It is obvious

that he thought it one of the most importnat things he had said up till then. In one of them, a verse letter to Denis Glover, Curnow uses a quotation from Louis MacNeice: “There is only hope for people who live upon islands.”

In “The Axe” and “Landfall in Unknown Seas” Curnow sees the impact of the stranger on the island from both points of view. He does away with the sometimes sickly nostalgia of the last century and points out that this impact has always been one of conflict—the homesick yearning becomes in

Curnow’s verse the thin trickle of blood in the water.

A. J. TASMAN Curnow describes “Landfall in Unknown Seas” as “a poem written on request for the New Zealand Government Department of Internal Affairs celebrating the discovery of New Zealand by A. J. Tasman on December 13, 1642.”

Curnow’s use of Tasman’s initials instead of his first name, Abel, is in keeping with his no-nonsense approach in the poem. Tasman, to Curnow, is not the adventurer roaming the high seas but the professional sailor with a job to do, a jolly good captain who goes about it in a businesslike way, as far as he can taking stock of the hazards involved. In the second section of the poem he recalls the tremendous excitement of landfall which almost at once gives way to dismay among the sailors at what they have found, and at their fatal encounter with the Maoris; the Maoris were islanders and “always to islanders danger is what comes over the sea.” The third section is a reflection on all that, pointing up the lasting significance of the trickle of blood in the water.