TALKING SHOP

Press, 4 September 1982, Page 16

TALKING SHOP

The Butcher Papers. By Vincent O'Sullivan. 0.U.P.. 1982. 63 pp. $10.95. (Reviewed by John Newton)

In this, his eleventh book of poems. Vincent O'Sullivan reprints the title sequence from his 1977 "Butcher and Co. To this he adds a second sequence of approximately the same length, in which Butcher, the meat vendor and “average bloke." continues to discourse on sex. religion, death and national identity. Coming as it does after a successful short story collection, and the _ impressive "Brother Jonathan. Brother Kafka” poem sequence. O'Sullivan's new book arouses high expectations. Among critical responses to the earlier poems (reprinted here on the dust-jacket) W. H. Oliver remarks. "O'Sullivan like onlv Glover before him. created a persona to ’epitomise a central aspect of New Zealand life." The comparison with Glover is useful, but as much for the contrasts as for the similarities. "The Butcher Papers” appears to be fuelled by two contradictory impulses. First. Butcher does seem to result from the attempt to create a straight-talking and representative male figure. This is part of Glover's achievement, and to an extent the simple forms and accessible imagery of the “Sings Harry" poems do — as O'Sullivan has said of Baxter's ballads — "bring poetry closer to the language and conceptions of the people he writes of."

But working against that kind of straightforward, utterance is the insistent complexity of O’Sullivan’s personal voice. Butcher, accordingly, is given to saying cryptic and unlikely things like “simply by railing with a new inflection/your engorgement's whirled” (a parody of Curnow), or "A second may spread like a

decade that's lived out butcher, one pulse fits all the dates which you know. Baldv." The butcher shop setting offers these poems a solid footing in the physical world and in common experience, as well as in commmon speech, and the particulars of Butcher’s trade occasionally vield imagery of great force, although explicit writing, is the exception here. In his previous volume. O'Sullivan seemed willing to let intellectual problems resolve themselves in terms of the physical world, and when he does so he can write with extraordinary vividness. In “The Butcher Papers." however, meaning more often has to be arduously’ quarried from out of the riddles and oblique syntax. There is a paradox here. For although these poems are smattered with vernacular speech, and although their forms are generally less conventional and less conspicuously artful. “The Butcher Papers" makes fa’r more difficult reading than the scholarly-looking "Brother Jonathan. Brother Kafka” sequence. There is an apparent attempt to set up a contrast between the forthright Butcher, and Baldy, his cousin, the poet and academic. Ironically, though, Butcher's speech is just as opaque as Baldy's. The book speaks the language of the ivied halls, far removed from the world of the butcher shop. O’Sullivan is entitled to write difficult poetry, and he has earned the right to expect his readers and reviewers to put into it the effort that it deserves. But because this book is so fraught with internal contradictions, and because O'Sullivan in his previous volume has written more excitingly as well as more accessibly, the resurrection of Butcher seems to be a step in an unrewarding direction.