Christchurch poetry: a revival?

Press, 2 May 1981, Page 17

Christchurch poetry: a revival?

Nothing but Switzerland and Lemonade. By Michael Harlow. Hawk Press, 1980, $7.80. Closer to the Bone. By Michael Morrissey. Sword Press, 1981. 51 pp. $5.50. She’s Not the Child of Sylvia Plath. By Michael Morrissey. Sword Press, .. 1981.43 pp. $4.50. Canticle. By Charles Bisley. Arbor Press, 1980, 56 pp. $7.50. Deprived Silence. By, Liz Drayton. Jade Print, 1980, 79 pp. $2.50.

(Reviewed by

Peter Simpson)

Three of the poets reviewed here recently took part in a poetry reading advertised as “Poetry Now: A Christchurch Revival,” a reference, presumably, to the relative dearth of interesting poetry produced in this city in recent years. This has not always been the case. In fact Christchurch virtually dominated New Zealand poetry for the century from 1850 to 1950, and, after the poets themselves suddenly fell silent or left for pastures new, remained a leading centre for the publication of poetry for another decade or two through publishers such as Caxton and Pegasus, and journals such as “Landfall.” ■ ■ ; The city's long pre-eminence in the field jlpd the. sudden decline, since the- fifties .(■an be simply'demonstrated. Of the first '22 poets in Allen. Curnow’s. “Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse” (1960) more than half, 14 to be exact, came from this part of the country. They were (in chronological order): C. C. Brown, William Pember Reeves, Arnold Wall, B. E. jßaughan. Ursula Bethell,. J. R, Hervey, /D'Arcy Cresswell; -Rewi Alley, Basil Dowling, .Charles Spear, W. Hart Smith, Allen Curnow, Denis Glover arid “Paul Henderson” (Ruth France). Of the remaining 14 poets in the book, however, only one was from Christchurch. The pattern is confirmed by a more recent anthology, Vincent O’Sullivan’s “Twentieth Century New Zealand Poetry” (1976). Of the first 16'poets included, eight were from Christchurch, but of the remaining 29 poets (representing the period since 1950) not one came from this city. V ' . ' The sudden drying up of the wells of poetry after a century of steady, if seldom spectacular flow, was not an arbitrary event but an aspect of a complex phase of cultural history which can only be glanced at here. The character of the Canterbury settlement was initially conducive to the establishment of a vigorous local poetic tradition. English literary culture was successfully enough replicated in Canterbury to sustain several generations of writers. There is a direct line of descent from Bbwen in the 1850 s to Reeves in the 1890 s to Curnow and Glover in the 19405, each • generation proving progresively more “acclimatised.” Development was arrested after the flowering of the Caxton group in the forties by the departure of the leading figures, Curnow and Glover, for the North Island, a shift which was symptomatic of a more profound shift of cultural energies to the north about that time. Since then Auckland and Wellington have replaced Christchurch as centres of poetic activity, Christchurch remaining fixed in the provincial and Anglo-centric posture which was as necessary and inevitable in the forties as it is anachronistic and reactionary now. In other arts, notably painting, Christchurch has moved beyond the limitations of a provincial outlook. In poetry, and in literature generally, the

discovery of an authentic vein of expresion ‘in the local conditions” has yet to occur. It is significant that most of . the good poets currently active in the city came here from elsewhere -- Michael Harlow from the United States, Rob Jackaman from the United Kingdom, Michael Morrissey from the North Island. Their work has little in common, and not much to do with the local environment, unless the fact of each writer pursuing his own solitary direction is itself a response of a sort to the local conditions. Michael Harlow’s inventive and sprightly “texts” (as he calls them — short prose narratives, surrealistic in manner) could, one feels, have been written anywhere; their provenance is “literary” and European, their antecedents cosmopolitan and international — not a quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle to be heard. An epigraph from “The Diary of Anais Nin” helps the reader to orientate himself within the surreal confusions of this Vienna wood (the Vienna of Freud, rather than Hoffmann): “Becoming more aware of this inner unconscious life we need a coresponding change in our art forms. The realisation that fantasy and memory are not separate activities, but the basic keys to our secret life demands a. change of fbctis...” This ' explains both, the novel forms of the texts and their recurrent concerns — the knots and psychodramas of domesic life. Most of the pieces are “family scenarios” (to borrow a suggestive title) involving husbands and wives,, mothers and fathers, parents and grandparents, children ap'd Mults, masters and servants, doctors and patients. The tensions and traumas, fears and desires, which, flourish in the unconscious issue here in. fantastic fictions ranging from the droll to. the sinister (a spectrum that calls to. mind a comparison with Klee). Humans, and their inanimate possessions and surrounding show an alarming tendency to.exchange identities: “A woman is climbing in and out of her. bedroom mirror. Her husband is plugged into the wall socket;”.“Today is the piano’s birthday. Yesterday, it was found weeping in the garden. Mother was not there, father was gone. B.ut today is the piano’s birthday... ”; “Ip. the dark pockets of the walls the shoes, listen for commands. Like worms their laces glow.” There is a hit and miss quality about other people’s fantasies. Sometimes they engage with one’s own, at others not. Such is the case with these texts. Some arouse deep responsive chords; others.leave me unmoved, but never, less than amused and intrigued by their fanciful gaiety and verbal exuberance. Michael Morrissey, still. living in Christchurch after a stint as.writer in residence at the university,, has. given birth to twins — two simultaneous publications — not identical, but both very much chips off the same block. The poems in the smaller book, “She’s Not the Child of Sylvia Plath” are mostly smaller and lighter — bite sized canapes to stimulate the appetite for getting “Closer to the Bone,” a more substantial meal. In “Why I never Write War Poems” Morrissey says: women and war were metaphors in my adolescent mind. Now my mind’s grown up I always think of women never write of war but women and warfare are still inextricably tangled in Morrissey’s mind; most of the poems read like dispatches

from the front Hines of a succession of sexual battlefields, "our mutual arena” (in the words of one poem). The few poems on topics other than the power politics of the bedroom tend to read like brief furloughs of what the Americans call R-and-R between engagements.” But though the focus is narrow the treatment is various enough to avoid monotony. We encounter movie madonnas, strippers, masseuses, aviatrixes; ladies with their feet in gumboots, their fingers stripping petals, their heads in ovens, their legs wrapped around cellos; ladies in saunas, in showers, on beds, falling off sofas; ladies with big bottoms, spread across “Penthouse,” sculpted in stone, gazing out of Victorian photographs. “I always think of women” is scarcely an exaggeration on the basis of these books. There is, too, a considerable range of tone and mood, ranging through the spectum of emotional postures from infatuation to bitter disenchantment, though the negative registers (scepticism, wryness, irony) tend to predominate over more effusive responses. In scale the pieces range from throwaway fragments to ambitious anatomies of relationships reminiscent of some of Lawrence’s love poetry. The writing is sometimes vivid, often sharp and witty and usually wellcontrolled, though judicious cutting in places would make for better effect. There is something claustrophobic, though, about the insistently male point of view. I found myself turning for antidote to one of the “children of Sylvia Plath” — the Canadian. Margaret’ Atwood — for a corrective voice from the female side of the story. ■ ■ “Poetry,” said Wallace Stevens, “must resist the intelligence almost successfully.” The- poems in Charles Bisley’s striking but demanding first book, “Canticle,” are rather' too “successful” in this respect. They .are often formidably difficult, especially in their flouting of ordinary syntax. Of course, as Eliot said, poetry can communicate before it is understood, and through 'powerful musical and imagistic effects. Bisley’s poems often communicate intensely if somewhat fitfully. Subtitled ■ “Poems from Tekapo and Akaroa” the volume draws on predominantly natural imagery — rocks, lakes, birds, trees, stars, flowers, rain, ice, in terms of which mental and emotional states are dramatised. In his avoidance of the sort of ironic and colloquial mariner so common in contemporary verse, Bisley appears to revert for models-to an -earlier period, to the early Yeats, say; before he threw off his embroidered clpak and chose to walk naked. The combination of high Romantic imagery and diction with radically disordered syntax makes for strikingly distinctive effects, which will not be to everyone’s taste, but’which reveal a gifted writer who has a clear sense of what he wants to do. ' Liz Drayton is a young writer who has yet to establish a' distinctive style. The poems in “Deprived. Silence” are sincere and somewhat raw- transcriptions of experience, no doubt valuable as a means of self-experience; but lacking the control of form and language necessary to make fully successful poems. . . Miss Drayton needs to seek out a wider range of subject matter if her ability is to find further poetic expression. The 35 poems in this book were written between the ages of seven and 18; they are the fruits of a sensitive childhood. Her talent holds the promise of growth.