Contemporary poems from a tradition

Press, 26 May 1979, Page 17

Contemporary poems from a tradition

(Reviewed by Peter Simpson) New Zealanders possess a tradition of indigenous poetry of good quality which now extends back at least half a century and encompasses the work of half a dozen distinct generations of poets. The contemporary scene is greatly enlivened by the fact that poets from all of these generations are still active and producing new work, as is evident from the titles published in the first quarter of 1979. Denis Glover is still writing prolifically nearly 50 years after his first poems appeared in student publications. Neither “For Whom The Cock Crows” (John Mclndoe, 83.95) nor “To Friends In Russia” (The Nag’s Head Press, $4.95) reaches the standard of his best work of the forties and fifties, but Glover’s admirers will find much to amuse and interest them. The first is a collection of comic and satirical pieces often ignited by absurdities culled from the daily news (such as the statement by a member of Federated Farmers for McKenzie that Henry Moore’s “Sheep Piece” should not be hept because “it is not a type of sheep that has made this area? The sculpture does not resemble a sheep ”) Most readers are likely to prefer Glover in witty and irreverent guise than as the gracious and duteous guest who visited Russia on the invitation of the Soviet Writers’ Union. Glover is on his best behaviour in these occasional pieces and just a trifle sententious and dull. Revisiting Murmansk, a city to which Glover had carried cargo during wartime navy service, stimulated his liveliest responses. The Second World War is also vividly recalled in the most interesting and unusual collection edited by Les Cleveland, "The Iron Hand” (Wai-te-ata Press, $4.50). Sub-titled “New Zealand Soldiers’ Poems from World War Two” the collection is in two parts; the first, “Greece, Crete, and the Western Desert’” consists of poems mostly written by unprofessional and sometimes anonymous writers culled from the pages of the “N.Z.E.F. Times”; the second, “North Italy” contains poems mostly written by the editor who took part in the Italian campaign. Fiction writers, notably Dan Davin, Guthrie Wilson, M. K. Joseph and Errol Brathwaite, have frequently drawn on the experience of New Zealanders at war. Most of the poems written about the war that have become well known are by noncombatants. Les Cleveland has performed an extremely useful service in compiling this very moving and interesting document, handsomely produced by the Wai-te-ata Press. Of the generation of poets who

emerged after the war one of the most accomplished is Kendrick Smithyman whose “Dwarf With a Billiard Cue” (Auckland/Oxford, $5.20) is his sixth collection.' Smithyman’s work has not changed much over the years; he remains as difficult, erudite, oblique, sinewy and tortuous as he was from the beginning. Smithyman admits with disarming candour in a note to this collection that even their author often finds his poems , “difficult to understand if not regrettably obscure,” a sentiment that any reader who struggles with the formidable complexities of these poems will heartily endorse. It is only too easy to let the eye slide over the surface of the poems gleaning the occasional phrase or particular that is easily assimilated. If one does take on a Smithyman poem in determined fashion it is generally worth the effort; his poems characteristically subject small moments of experience to sustained, intense mental scutiny, revealing a mind that is curious, subtle,' learned and perverse. Like Smithyman, C. K. Stead is a lecturer in English at the University of Auckland, but for the most part Stead does not allow his scholarship (which is considerable) to clutter the surface of his poems which are attractively immediate and direct. “Walking Westward” (The Shed, $3) is his fourth collection and consists largely of four poetic sequences “each with its own tempo and colours, each with its own principle of composition” (to quote the author’s helpful note). “Breaking the Neck: An Autumn Sketchbook” is made up of brief imagistic fragments Of which the following is typical: The Sky has gone dead. The park crunches underfoot. The English trees are going to pieces again, “Twenty-one Sonnets” are nakedly personal pieces written in the loose form of Baxter’s Jerusalem sonnet sequences, full of literary gossip at their worst, but sometimes eloquent and lively. “Uta” consists of 50 translations from classical Japanese poems. In Japanese the uta form (like the better known haiku) employs a fixed number of syllables (31) in five lines of set length. Stead has retained the lineation of the original, but not the syllable count. Some of them come off, others do not; some read like Solemn Oriental truisms: “Every man/must die./That so/Let us beforehand/be cheerfuL” others take flight: “Does this river/frozen/feel as I do/under ice/the flow of love?” The title-sequence is described by Stead as “composed of random memory, but put together as music, not as autobiography.” The technique

is derived from Ezra Pound and is expertly employed, drawing together people and places from New Zealand, Australia, Britain, the Mediterranean, and from literature, into a pattern that is lucidly transparent and densely reticulated. This is a collection that is highly professional and continuously entertaining. During the fifties and sixties poets in New Zealand tended to belong to one of two warring camps, one located in Auckland with Allen Curnow at its centre (and to which Smithyman and Stead belonged) and one in Wellington with Baxter at its centre. The Wellington poets practised a poetry that was more human centred, urban, satirical. This group has now largely dissipated as its members either stopped writing, died, or emigrated. One of the emigrants was Peter Bland, an Englishman who lived in New Zealand for a dozen years before returning to England in the late sixties. He still continues to publish in this country, however, and perhaps the strongest poems in his latest small collection, “Primitives” (Wai-te-ata Press, $3) are those with New Zealand settings or subjects. Typically deft, direct and lively is “Mr Maui Builds a New Office Block,” a Wellington poem: I’m changing things. My yellow cranes dangle whole office blocks or smash chained suns onto your rotting wood. I push whole streets aside — trees, benches, pubs, old graveyards, all that scaled down junk . . . Another, especially successful piece is “Guthrie-Smith at Tutira,” a fascinating analysis of the colonial mentality: Who am 1? What am I doing here alone with 3000 sheep? I’m

turning their bones into grass. Later I’ll turn grass back into sheep. I buy only the old and lame. They eat anything — bush, bracken, gorse. Dead, they melt into one green fleece ... With Bland’s departure something valuable disappeared from New Zealand poetry. It is good to hear his unmistakeable voice again — cheerful, fanciful but dead accurate. The late sixties and early seventies brought a new generation of poets to the fore, iconoclastic, experimental, American influenced. Some of the best of them were associated with the Auckland journal “Freed,” including Murray Edmond whose “Patchwork” (Hawk Press, $6.60) is his second collection. A sequence of nine poems (some in several parts) it focuses on the birth and infancy of the poet’s son. These are simple, direct and patently sincere poems, somewhat flat rhythmically, though an elaborate pattern of verbal, thematic and image connections between the separate pieces provides a compensating density of texture. Some exquisite monoprints by Janet Paul also contribute substantially to the success of the volume. Christchurch poets are being well served by Oxenhall Publishers, a local venture, producing attractive, inexpensive volumes. Their latest publication is “I Snatch At Planets” by Mollie Ames, a well written and various collection of short poems, encompassing quiet humour, deep feeling and careful observation. Some of the verses struck me as a little over-written, metaphors extended excessively, alliteration employed to the point of mannerism, out considering this is a first volume it shows definite promise.