After the poetic "revolution" of 1970

Press, 13 February 1982, Page 17

After the poetic "revolution" of 1970

End Wall. By Murray Edmond. Oxford U.P., 1982, 48 pp. $9.95. Beethoven’s Guitar. By Peter Olds. Caveman Press, 1980. 48 pp. $4.95. s Ancestors. By Brian Turner. John Mclndoe, 1981. 62 pp. $8.95. (Reviewed by. Peter 'Simpson) Peter Olds, Murray Edmond ; ,and Brian Turner late sixties ‘aria early seventies' as members of v a new generation of writers who rapidly transformed the poetry scene, in New Zealand. They were part of “The Ngxt.,Revolution,” to quote the title of a projected anthology at the time with which Turner was involved. The anthology never eventuated but the revolution did, its most representative publication at the time of maximum momentum being theanthology “The Young New Zealand Poets” (1973), which included Olds and Edmond among its 19 contributors. 'Now, in the eighties, the revolutionary metaphor no longer seems appropriate. The group identity of the movement has broken up as some writers (such as Gary Langford) have settled abroad, while others (such as Alan Brunton and Russell Haley) have largely abandoned poetry for other media, and still others (such as Rhys Pasley and Denis List) appear to have stopped writing poetry (or at least stopped publishing their work). New writers have emerged in the meantime (especially a strong group of women poets), few of whom appear concerned to carry forward the revolution along the lines laid down by-the avant garde of 1970. New Zealand poetry in the eignties presents the reader with a plurality of voices reflecting a considerable range of theoretical viewpoints and individual styles. The most substantial of the young poets of a decade ago have each developed with increasing maturity an idiosyncratic method and voice. Such is the case with Turner, Edmond and Olds, whose second, third and fourth books these are respectively. A major force in the poets of this generation was the influence of American poets in place of the British influences which were dominant for earlier New Zealand poets. Yeats. Eliot. Auden and Dylan Thomas gave way to Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg (along with a host of other figures from the rich variety of post-war American poetry) as the most admired and influential masters. In the better writers these influences are by now fully assimilated though still discernible. Peter Olds owed .most to American popular culture, especially the rock music of Elvis Presley ana Bob Dylan, and to the poetry of the Beat generation of Ginsberg and Kerouac. His early work was a frenetic celebration of “sex. drugs and rock ’n’ roll” and the thrills and spills of life “on the road.”. Its most notable feature was its raw- vitality, its unsophisticated not to say crude transmission of direct experience: ■ Elements of this remain in the present

book, but the frenzy in road poems such as the strongly Bob Dylan-influenced “Notes on State Highway Number One” seems a bit factitious, trumped-up. not far removed from the nostalgic pastiche of Sha Na Na. The more authentic poems are often retrospective, looking back at the mayhem of the past from the perspective of a burnt-out survivor, attempting to recreate verbally The energy-of reckless excess: » . That night (with you) I drove like a nut’case from Invercargill to Dunedin - Man; I felt as hot and cool, as a racing driver, the steering wheel violent all the way to my toes. Your body, wide-eyed, bent forward ready to smash through the windshield. The nostalgic element in the poems is emphasised in a number of elegiac poems addressed to dead relatives (“A View from Oriental Bay”), dead friends (“Elegy for Red Alan”) or dead culture heroes such as Elvis Presley (“King Dead”). Perhaps the best poem here is the title piece, “Beethoven’s Guitar,” an immensely vital poem about life in a psychiatric hospital; the delusions of the patients are used to create a surreal pantomime in which the genuine pathos of the situation is not pushed down our throats, but spills between the lines of the comic/grotesque mode of presentation, creating a rich complexity of emotional effect. Brian Turner is also a Dunedin poet, but of an altogether different kind. His most characteristic poems document with quiet intensity the inner landscape of mind and feelings and the outer landscape of the Otago countryside and sea-coast. He is a consciously regional poet, and has expressed’his aim as being to create (in the words of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney) “the living speech of a landscape." This aim gives his work affinities with other Otago poets who have attempted to record the peculiarities of the local scene and find in it correlatives for their moods and perceptions, such as Charles Brasch and James K. Baxter. Poems such as "Otago Peninsula" are consciously within a tradition both social and literary, and draw strength from that consciousness: Here the whole range of earth's colours sprawl on paddock, stone wall and crumpled sea. Nothing is left untouched by sparse sunlight, slanting rain, fists'of wind punching the ribs of the land. Here, under tough grasses and the crust of sheep and cattle tracks crumble the' fondest dreams and prophecies. No one came who stayed to conquer, no one came

who was not beaten down or turned away for another time. The verbal authority of Turner’s writing, the way in which meaning is enforced by all the ingredients of poetic technique, is clear from this extract. Few of the poems are straight “landscapes”; they grow out of the variety of activities (sailing, fishing, tramping, reading, domestic life) and relationships (with children, women, animals, strangers) of which the author’s life is composed. Like Robert Lowell, whose work is twice alluded to, Turner makes his poems out of honest confrontation with his most urgent personal concerns. In subjective poetry of this sort much depends on the capacity of the poet to find a distinctive voice to give authenticity to his reflections. In this Turner has succeeded, achieving a remarkable consistency throughout the collection, though possibly at the expense of the diversity of manner which was a feature of his first book. Murray Edmond's poems also spring from a number of dominant personal concerns, several of which he shares with Turner. Personal and family relationships figure prominently (with wife, child, brother, mother). Then there is a concern with the theme of habitation, of living in a particular place, and of having a place to live in. that links a group of poems with diverse geographical settings (some European, some New Zealand and some which combine and juxtapose the twoi with another group that focuses on various sorts of dwelling (as in “A House By the Sea." “Shack" and “Poems of the End Wall"). Another sort of construction Edmond writes about is poems themselves, which are built from words as houses are from timber. Typically these themes are not treated separately, but are interwoven together, resulting as the book proceeds in a growing density of implication and cross reference with sudden and sometimes puzzling leaps from one level to another. A pattern of repeated images and verbal motifs is built up which makes of the whole structure an intricate network. The ambition is considerable, but so also is the artistry that is brought to the task. Individual poems, such as the delightful love poem “Song of the Consequences.” are satisfyingly complete, but taken in context both enrich and are enriched by the filaments which connect them with the surrounding poems. This is a book that one needs to spend time with to get the full effect. It is yet another example of a local writer having fully absorbed the technical lessons derived from study of the masters (in Edmond's case surrealism crossed with ideas about structure from American post-modernism) and put them to the service of his own maturing sense of life. All three poets are making a significant individual contribution to the collective task of, in the words of Edmond’s “Stopping the Heart": building for each other a common vision to inhabit