Devotion to the small

Press, 29 May 1982, Page 16

Devotion to the small

Today is the Piano’s Birthday. By Michael Harlow. Auckland University Press/Oxford University Press, 1981. 65 pp. $6.90. (Reviewed by Peter Simpson) Michael Harlow is one of the most cosmopolitan of New Zealand poets. Greek-American by birth, he has lived for longish periods in several countries. He was first in New Zealand in the sixties, during which period he edited the journal “Frontiers." one of the harbingers of a general quickening of poetry in that period. He has published two books in Greece and this is his second collection since his return to New Zealand. It includes poems from magazines published in Australia, the United States, Greece and Britain as well as New Zealand. Harlow’s poetic outlook is cosmopolitan, too. He is thoroughly familiar with modern poetry and poetics both in its European and American manifestations, which means that he is aware of European movements such as surrealism as well as of the post-Poundian American tradition to which Robert Creeley (similarly devoted to the small) is probably Harlow's most direct connection. The decor of the poems is largely European. Many refer to Mediterranean events and their whole ambience is "old world" (though seen from a very "up-to-date” perspective). Notice, for instance the striking use of surrealism to make a political point in “The Witness Chair": Watch, how they break the legs of the chair, the arms how they twist the spine-slats, out of its back the head/rest cracked to bits how they slip one by one into their pockets a comb, a streetcar token, the stub of a pencil, a gold ring

Harlow's imaginative grounding in New Zealand is as light as a fantail's touch. In fact a fantail is one of the few dinkum Kiwi touches Harlow allows himself: "in mid-flight, fantails/pinned against the light.” Some would see this “rootless cosmopolitanism" as a fault: “where have all the; cabbage-trees gone." but "subject matter" is never a valid test of good poetry, and many other New Zealand poets’from Mason onwards (Spear. Challis. Manhire, for instance) have been equally indifferent to a recognisably regional reality. Many of Harlow's poems do refer to an immediate physical environment, in fact, but their locale is domestic and urban rather than landscape — a matter of bodies and rooms rather than vistas. For example: The room half-shadow light stripes the perfectly round bath you step .from glistening you bend to the sand-coloured floor This is a scene which could happen anywhere, and which might just as well recall poems by' D. H. Lawrence and William Carlos Williams (who provided the formal model) as any “real" event or place. The title of the poem quoted above is “Devotion to the Small," a phrase which might be applied not only to the things to which the poems refer (a plethora of tiny birds, insects, animals, coins, and other objects) but also to their form. Most of the poems are brief and Harlow generally .favours a short line which results in a typical nervous, darting movement, like the flight of a small, bird. Indeed, the poems resemble nothing so much as the aforementioned fantail. They are similarly charming and unpredictable; they flit gaily and athletically; their structure is fragile and intricate. Some readers will doubtless find Harlow’s verse “light-weight” in the pejorative sense, inconsequential and superficially clever. Sometimes the poems merit this criticism: they lack “gravity." their intricacy seems fussy and selfregarding. But usually the poems are much more than elegant verbal arabesques; they are tough and graceful structures, excellently put together and sophisticated in their aerodynamics; the best of them really take flight. The physical production of the book, incidentally, is in keeping with contents: a well-made book of well-made poems.