Selections from Hunt and Tuwhare

Press, 26 December 1987, Page 19

Selections from Hunt and Tuwhare

Selected Poems. By Sam Hunt. Penguin, 1987. 142 pp. $15.50 (paperback). Mihi: Collected Poems. By Hone Tuwhare. Penguin, 1987. 174 pp. $17.99 (paperback). (Reviewed by Tim Upperton). Sam Hunt looms much larger in the popular imagination than his work. Talk with those who have seen and heard Hunt perform (and there must be many thousands) and they will fondly recall the stance, the mannerisms, the “Foxton straights,” the dog, the Steinlagers. You are also likely to get an amateurish imitation Of that harsh, braying, strangely attractive voice. What you are not likely to get is one line of remembered poetry. They didn’t go to hear the poetry. They went to hear and see Sam Hunt. Well, you don’t hear Sam Hunt in “Selected Poems,” but you do see him, staring right back at you from the front cover. Get past the stare to the poems themselves and Hunt is there, too. In “A Mangaweka Roadsong,” for instance: They ask me why I travel, never settle down. I lose two games of pool and hitch-hike out of town. To appreciate the poems as poems,

one needs to forget everything one has heard about Hunt the man. But that is exactly what the poems won’t let you do: so many of them feed, or feed off, the Hunt legend. And to one unimpressed by the legend, the abovequoted lines generate about as much mystery as the end of a “Lone Ranger” episode, where two men are left staring at a silver bullet. For a selection, this book includes too many bad poems, which suggests that the selector, Michael Richards, has done a poor job, or that there are not enough good poems to choose from. Take “Sevana,” where the speaker searches the phonebook for an old girlfriend’s number — there simply isn’t the dramatic situation, the intellectual or emotional stuffing, to make a good poem; and what are the “Bow-Wow” poems doing here? Richards, in his somewhat defensive introduction, writes that guiding Jiis selection is his intention “to present poems that to me have poetic value”: his criteria for deciding what has poetic value are, to say the least, wide-ranging. In a recent “Listener” review of “Selected Poems,” Patrick Evans described Sam Hunt as a poet “peculiarly badly served by the printed word.” But words (printed or otherwise) cannot serve well or badly,

they can only serve; any blame must in the end rest with the workman, not his tools. Those hoping to scoop Hone Tuwhare’s entire oeuvre by purchasing “Mihi: Collected Poems” will be disappointed: the “collection" is in fact, like Hunt’s book, a selection. Nonetheless there are a lot of poems here, ranging from much-anthologised favourites (“Rain,” “No Ordinary Sun,” “The Old Place,” “Old Man Chanting in the Dark”), to poems previously unpublished (harder to pick these, as no publication details are included with the poems). Generally speaking, Tuwhare’s poems have not the close symbiotic relation with their maker that one observes in Hunt’s. The “I” that is the poet is less obtrusive, often only detectable as a wry undercurrent to a different voice, as in “Old Man Chanting in the Dark.” And when Tuwhare does appear to speak directly and personally, he will often turn an ironic eye on himself: in “Hotere,” for example, his deliberately philistine verbal responses to his friend’s paintings are comically self-deflating. Tuwhare has his stylistic faults (fans would say, characteristics): his frequent use of litotes, for instance, in “No Ordinary Sun” and elsewhere, lends an archaic preciousness to his language at odds with the unpretentious, down-to-earth quality that is one of its main strengths. But “Mihi” is more conspicuous for its successes than its failures, and those who have read little of Tuwhare’s work before are in for a feast.