Patriots and expatriates of poetry

Press, 1 August 1981, Page 17

Patriots and expatriates of poetry

Selected Poems. By Hone Tuwhare. John Mcindoe. $6.95. The Dangers of Art. By Kevin Ireland. Cicada Press. $5.95. (Reviewed by Peter Simpson) Hone Tuwhare and Kevin Ireland belong to the most diverse and least cohesive generation of New Zealand poets: that which emerged in the early sixties. Betw-een 1963 and 1965 about a dozen first collections of merit were published (including Tuwhare’s “No Ordinary Sun” and Ireland’s “Face to Face”) marking the appearance of a distinct new wave in our poetry.

The fall-out and dispersal rate among this group. however. has been extraordinarily high. Tuwhare is one of the few (Vincent O’Sullivan. Alistair Paterson and C. K. Stead are others) who have remained resident and active in New Zealand. Of the rest several were recent British migrants who either stopped publishing (Gordon Challis, Raymond Ward) or moved on to other countries (Mike Doyle to Canada, Peter Bland back to Britain), and of the locals several have taken Fairburn’s barbed advice and “taken a ticket for Megalopolis” (Richard Packer to Sydney, Owen Leeming to France and Fleur Adcock and Kevin Ireland to London). Their poetry is as various as the paths they have followed, but most have to some degree kept up literary connections with New Zealand.

Hone Tuwhare’s poems are as home grown as a feed of mussels. His “Selected Poems” draws on five previous collections, though fully half of the contents come from his perennially popular first book (reprinted more often. I suspect, than any other book of poems by a New Zealander). These poems still retain their authority and freshness, the “muscle and bone of song” (in the words of one title) with which he articulated, for the first time in English, a Maori vision of life and the land: There let the waves lave

pleasuring the body's senses, and the sun's .feet

shall twinkle and. .flex

to the sea-egg’s needling, and the paua’s stout kiss

shall drain a rock’s heart

to the sandbar's booming. Through the metaphoric exuberance and kinetic vitality of such passages the landscape comes alive. Furthermore, it is for the most part a people landscape in contrast with the curiously empty landscape (“landscape with too few lovers" in Colin McCahon’s memorable phrase) of much Pakeha art.

Since his first book Tuwhare has freed up his rhythms and adopted a more intimate, colloquial tone, abandoning the sometimes archaic and elevated rhetoric of earlier poems. For example: On the mud-flats near Hula with an ebb-tide thinning the cockle-beds, we watch the pied oyster-catchers long-beaking the crabs in their holes. Neat. There are no ecstatic screams. Supremely indifferent they swing long thin beaks from side to side like mine-detectors. Perhaps the influence of public.readings (of which Tuwhare is a master) is detectable in this informal directness (though effects which bring down the house do not always work so well on the page). He is at his best when some formal pressure (the contrast between two different registers of language in the superb poem addressed to Ralph Hotere, for instance) imposes a discipline on his natural eloquence.

There is not much likelihood that Hone Tuwhare will take himself off to the other side of the world, but in case he is comtemplating it we should instantly declare him a Priceless National Treasure and forbid his export.

Kevin Ireland is something of an enigma. He left New Zealand more than 20 years ago, but his literary career is

entirely a New Zealand phenomenon. All his work is published-here (“The Dangers of Art" is his seventh book), and. unlike Bland and Adcock, say, he appears to have made no attempt to establish himself as a poet in England. In occasional poems such as “A Shrinking World.” written during a recent return visit, he exploits his expatriate’s perspective: how could I have thought that One Tree Hill ,was a mountain of lanky frizzy pines? this morning it is a sandcastlc with a single gull's feather tilting at the top More often, though. Ireland's poems inhabit a verbal universe that seems entirely independent of “place.” What he offers (in the words of one title) is “A View From the Mind.” For example: Freedom said I love you dear Subjection rattled his cold chains Logic said I know no fear Nonsense blasted out his brains. As this specimen suggests Ireland has mastered the unfashionable techniques of metre and rhyme which he exploits with remarkable dexterity. His most typical poems involve the witty and shapely working out of an initial poetic idea, often by ransacking the verbal resources associated with it. “The Truth of Tea Leaves." for example, exploits the vocabulary of fortune telling; “New Rules for Love,” explores a relationship in terms of the lingo of wrestling: My plan would be to straddle you unth the Boston Crab or maybe I'd perform a Leg Grapevine followed by my infamous Octopus Clamp.

Though Ireland described his current masters as the seventeenth centry lyric poets, he learnt his trade by studying Mason, Glover and Fairbum. and I am often reminded of Fairbum in particular by the serious levity and verbal gymnastics of these poems. It was gratifying, then, to find late in a book a trenchant assessment of Fairburn’s current loss of favour: what a magical poet

they were thrilled to say till his signs and gifts

were taken away

now perky with distance

they imagine they see

he was never the giant

they took him to be

“The bangers of Art" not only makes very refreshing reading; it is also very good to look at, with a spanking cover design in red. black and white by Billy Apple.