Something New

  We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books. 

“DEEP COLOUR” by Diana Bridge (Otago University Press, $NZ25); “AS THE TREES HAVE GROWN” by Stephanie de Montalk (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25); “JAMES K. BAXTER – THE SELECTED POEMS” Edited by John Weir (THWUP $NZ 40)

            Three years ago, I had the pleasure of reading and reviewing Diana Bridge’s seventh collection of poetry Two or More Islands . I at once admired the way she used mythological and literary references which showed real erudition on her part, and how she could make meaningful statements about the present age from them. I concluded my (regrettably brief) review with the statement “I can only give superlatives to this sane and satisfying collection”

 

            Diana Bridge’s latest (eighth) collection Deep Colour opens with the eponymous poem “Deep Colour”. Beginning as a reflection on fish deep down in an aquarium, it morphs into a consideration of time and loss where “Day after day / the past waits for the present to fall / into its hands. One truth will soon displace / another; I am left with this. A life gathers its themes, / some of which it may never weave.” Time and transience are relentless and what is to come is never really fulfilled. And given that these are major themes in this collection, there is much alternation between the present and the past.

 

The first section of this collection focuses on present life, but present life which is often looking back. “In memoriam” is two elegies for a dead friend, “A split sky” and “Moving through leaves”. Two poems recall raising an infant, “Freestanding” being essentially about a child beginning to walk; and “Singapore shapes” depicting an infant becoming used to the shapes in the world. Some poems are written in the third person but (at least to this reader) seem to be close to confessional (“She spends time with objects” and “Her sort of order”). Bridge is very interested in shapes, texture, colours – an aesthetic appreciation of physical reality. It is no surprise, then, that she is very concerned with visual art. “He has put away pointers” is a reflection on a painting by Pissarro but, like “Deep Colour”, is becomes a study in the colours and the moods (or emotions) they incite. In examining another painting, “A butterfly floats in the paint”, there are references to the famous butterfly dream of an ancient Chinese sage. Bridge is, as later poems prove, deeply interested in Asian culture.  Perhaps her most rebellious poem is “Singing robes” where she refuses to tie physical reality to abstract ideas. Giving an almost geometric account of things seen in early spring, the poem concludes “Must you tie it all to something? If I were Wordsworth, / I would think you must, for fear that spring be wasted.” But spring is never wasted if one simply admires and appreciates spring without dissecting or explaining it. Goodbye Wordsworthian cloudy transcendentalism.

Given this aesthetic attitude to physical reality, the collection’s second section, called “Utamaro’s Objects” comprises poems inspired by the 18^th century Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro and his depictions of the natural world. The sequence “Songs of the garden” evokes the artist’s images of flowers and plants, but more often images of small creatures such as insects, butterflies and skinks. We are in a walled Japanese garden, but because we are following Kitagawa Utamaro’s images, we are observing nature at second hand. These poems are delicate, like the small creatures, and inevitably conjure up images of antique Japanese brush-work

Digging into the even deeper past, the third section, “Fifteen Poems on Things: Translations” takes us back to poems by the Chinese poet Xie Tiao (fl.460-494 AD). Bridge’s translations, like any translations, can never replicate exactly the original poems. There is no way that two very different languages can be synchronised, especially when the languages are separated by 1600 years. Even so, Bridge’s translations are a tour de force. Though the inspiration is an ancient one, we are drawn more directly into nature. The opening poem, “the wind” is an exquisite piece of work, characterising the wind in terms of the things it moves “Gently intermittent, it draws the red bud from its case; / Its thick mass spread, green cocklebur is stirred. / Drooping willows bend and then rise up; / young duckweed comes together, to disperse. / In the corridor, long sleeves are blown about…” Thus in the following poems in the sequence “the bamboo” “the rose bush” “the rushes” [which references a song by a Chinese empress], although as the sequence moves on, its observations are more about human reactions to the world of nature, and becomes much more concerned with human behaviour, as in the lament of a courtesan separated from her lover.

The final fifteen poems of this collection revert to the present time and the poet’s own voice, first delving into the impact of Hamlet in “Compared to silence” which wanders along the paths of human perception and asks if it is words or tones of music that create out moods, beliefs, understanding. Sometimes perhaps silence (“the rest is silence”) is better than articulation. Equally concerned with poetry, “The critic at sunset” – inspired by something Clive James wrote - examines inspiration as experienced by the poet. I am interested that two of Bridge’s longer poems are intriguingly ambiguous in their meaning. “Empty your head” views colonialism and the European taking of [in this case] Australia while being in tension with the importance of discovery and advanced science – almost implying that discovery, de-mystifying legends about the Earth, was inevitable. “Irish Girls”, drawing on accounts of immigrant Irish girls incarcerated in Seacliff Hospital in the late 19^th century, presents us with a contest between the hard reality of the girls’ experience and the bush which, as depicted here, seems like a compensating refuge for the girls.

None of this analysis of the collection ignores that fact that Diana Bridge is capable of pure pastoral.  Expression of seasons are dominant in “Canterbury contrapuntal” and “Walking during lockdown”; while “Accommodations” comes close to saying that nature follows art.

Diana Bridge’s poems are not to be read quickly and superficially. They require of the reader concentration and much re-reading. I confess [reluctantly] that I was sometimes daunted by the copious end-notes telling me the inspiration of many poems. But I again see Bridge’s work as  essential reading for anybody who wants to take the pulse of current poetry. A collection to be read and re-read.

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To put it mildly, Stephanie de Montalk’s poetry is radically different from the poetry of Diane Bridge. While Bridge prefers stately, packed stanzas, de Montalk prefers lean, narrow lines (three or four or five words per line). While Bridge is very reflective and very concerned with time and art, de Montalk is more impulsive and brisk and immersed in nature. But don’t assume that her world view is frivolous. Besides, it’s good to remember the dictum that comparisons are odious. Bridge is Bridge; de Montalk is de Montalk.

As the trees have grown is de Montalk’s fifth collection of poetry. The title As the trees have grown comes from a poem buried well into the text called “You will touch down” which declares that “[I] find that as / the trees have grown / so, too, the boxy / twin-engine congregations / of kereru – air ferries / of the species - / and the delicate nests / of titipounamu…” – really a simple declaration that the seasons turn and growth continues… and much honour to de Montalk for singling out the wonderful, bulky kereru as a harbinger of healthy avian existence and the titipounamu [“rifleman”] as the tiny but resilient creature it is.

In the collection’s opening poem “Heartfelt” the human body is compared with landscape. The murmur of the heart is like a waltz or fox-trot in the process of having cardiac problems examined. The six poems that immediately follow “Heartfelt” reference medical situations and hospital procedures, though gradually sliding into images of animals, trees and the farmyard, almost as if these are the disoriented thoughts of the patient, under anaesthetics, either undergoing or awaiting surgery, hallucinatory but vivid, like the best surrealism. Things are vivid and clearly delineated even if the poet [or poet’s narrator] is disoriented. A reader can only assume that these are poems born of the poet’s own experience.

The second section of the collection opens with an outright embrace of the weather and wind with the poem “Allurement” which reads in full “Last weekend the wind / brought cobalt skies, / bright hills and cicadas / louder than you’re likely / to remember them. / The cats slept in fresh grass, / leaves swirled / on the lower lawn, / and all day there was / a deep, white light / and everything / with an edge to it. ” Many different moods are struck in this section. The poem “Papaver somniferum”  wherein, says the narrator “I searched for Aunti Emma”, which makes sense of this only when an end-note advises us that “Aunti Emma” is a street name for opium – and the poem is in part about searching for the stuff in a hostile natural environment. There is a strong strain of fatalism in de Montalk’s world-view. The offbeat “Amor fati” considers the stoic embrace of fate, exampled in the life of a peripatetic trout. “Events” is also fatalist philosophy

De Montalk opens her third section with the Stoa (location in ancient Greece where stoicism was taught) and moves into poems relating what appear to be about a particular location as the weather and winds and seasons work around it, either benignly or intimidatingly. Here de Montalk comes closest to a Romantic concept of a force rolling through all things., while “Park Life” is purely objective observation of birds.

We then, in the fourth section, move into what is apparently nostalgia, taking us to the northern reaches of the North Island as remembered from childhood. The poem “The far north” begins “Does the sea still sing in summer, / blue between the dusty hills / and northern sky, cloudless / and cicada strong on the gravel / road to Paihia…? ” suggesting that the poet has long since been far from the far north (de Montalk is based in Wellington). “At Waitangi” is about her brother, as a youngster, catching fish. And yet “Tide line” comes back to the subjective views of a patient still in hospital – the “far north” is something being conjured up in a semi-conscious state. “Ground report” watches the demolition of an admired tree, but rather than lamenting, the poem takes the stoical position that things will be as they will be and that a smaller tree nearby may one day be as towering as the demolished giant. Fate rules again.

One of the longest poems in the collection “Time-distant” is an account of pilgrims going to Lourdes, presumably to be healed of afflictions. This bring us back to the matter of affliction and healing as seen in the collection’s earlier poems about hospital existence; but “Time-distant” appears not to be something de Montalk has herself witnessed. The very title “Time-distant” says this is something that happened in the distant past – and indeed an end-note tells us that de Montalk’s poem is drawing on the novel Lourdes by Emile Zola, a sceptical and anti-clerical account of the Lourdes phenomenon. In the circumstances, and given Zola’s fiercely anti-religious attitude, what de Montalk produces is relatively neutral about the phenomenon.

The longest poem, closing the volume, is “Sleave of care”. Its title is drawn from a phrase in Macbeth but, as de Montalk says in her end-notes, the discursive poem has nothing to do with Shakespeare. Instead, it is an elaborate account of a garden and estate in Ukraine which was originally created by Polish nobles. The poem is apparently based on the poet’s visit to this place, and is aware of trees and foliage now changing the face of what was once a place of pleasure in “Polish Ukraine”. Tempus fugit. Time changes all, but the working of nature is still fascinating and beguiling.

I do not find de Montalk’s largely que sera sera fatalist philosophy oppressive. It gives her the freedom to look at past, present and [possible] future impartially and it certainly keeps her in a position to look at things – even unpleasant ones like hospitalisation – with a truthful eye and an acute sense of physical reality, even when the mind is disoriented.

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John Weir is a priest and academic and John Weir is a poet (see a review of his SparksAmong the Stubble on this blog). But John Weir is probably best known for his friendship with James K. Baxter and, over the half-century since Baxter died, for curating and keeping in the public mind the work of Baxter. Weir has edited Baxter’s Collected Poems (1979) and then much later Baxter’s Complete Poems (2022) as well as the four volumes of James K. Baxter : Complete Prose (2015) which is reviewed in detail on this blog. There is no doubt that Baxter was one of New Zealand’s greatest – and most quotable – poets, appealing to many people. I remember as a teenager reading with great pleasure Baxter’s early collection (published in 1953) The Fallen House, the first book of poetry I read by my own choice rather than being told to do so by a teacher. Of course, for many reasons, Baxter was also a controversial person, very questionable in his private life and very performative in his public life (see on this blog The Baxter Problem). 

Now we have James K. Baxter: The Selected Poems edited by John Weir and oddly enough it is very welcome. The Collected and Complete poems of Baxter were very bulky tomes, sometimes difficult to hold or move around. The Selected Poems are of a more reasonable width and bulk. Over its 310 pages of poetry, Weir divides Baxter’s poetry into four sections – “The Early Years: Dunedin and Christchurch 1945-1949” ; “The Wellington Years and a Visit to India 1950-1965” ; “Return to Dunedin 1966-1968” ; and finally “The Jerusalem Years 1969-1972”. This sequence allows us, if we choose to read from beginning to end, to see how Baxter’s poetry shifted in style and content.

In his introduction John Weir remarks that Baxter was “by any standards, a remarkably prolific poet” (p.xv). This is putting it modestly. About 3,000 surviving poems were written by Baxter. Weir gives a concise biography of the man. Baxter had written over 600 poems before he was 18, when his first collection was published. Until he kicked the habit in the late 1950s, when he was about 30, Baxter was a slave to alcoholism. Weir traces handily Baxter’s genesis and evolution as a poet – moving from a leaning on the Romantics and French Decadents to a greater alertness to the New Zealand scene and a more colloquial style until he was “called” to Jerusalem in the late 1960s and died in 1972 aged 46. Weir makes one painful but necessary statement: “[Baxter] was… a willing partner in a number of sexual liaisons. While most of these were consensual, there were at least two which can be classified as rape. While the revelation of this fact has quite properly caused severe damage to his reputation as a man, it should also be said that, despite his preoccupation with sex and despite the serious offences he committed, he also gave direction and compassionate assistance to two hundreds of people, young and old.” (p.xx) I speculate – and with the greatest respect – that Weir would, in his life as a priest, have heard many unpleasant confessions in the confessional, but this particular revelation would probably have been the most upsetting for him. Baxter was a guru with feet of clay.

Weir claims Baxter “bequeathed to New Zealanders a blueprint for social reconstruction based on Christian and Maori cultural values and a body of poetry and prose that was remarkable for its range and for the sense of a life lived here, in Aotearoa New Zealand.” (p.xxi) Well… maybe, though it is hard to see Baxter’s polemics as amounting to a blueprint.

Here, though is the very best thing about James K. Baxter: The Selected Poems. Weir says this selection based on “what I consider to be the best and most recognisable poems Baxter wrote” and hence it is in the tradition of “Best Poems” (p.xxi)

Reader – I will not lie to you. I have not read the Selected Poems from beginning to end, if only because I have already read nearly all Baxter’s verse in other publications. But I did spend a week or so dipping in and out of these selected poems, enjoying old favourites from the first poem, teenager Baxter’s concise “High Country Weather”, to the very last poem, Baxter’s ranting “Ode to Auckland” with its notorious opening line “Auckland, you great arsehole”. Yes, at his worst, Baxter could turn to rant. I revelled again in the early stuff “The Fallen House”, “The Bay” and “Wild Bees”, and that great colloquial elegy “Lament for Barney Flanagan”. I paused at “Howrah Bridge”, which I think was a turning point in Baxter’s work; and I once again felt very ambiguous about “Thoughts of a Remuera Housewife”, which now seems a rather smug and self-satisfied piece of work (Jimmy Baxter showing he’s not one of the bourgeoisie). Then there were the great poems identified with place like “At Brighton Bay”, “Winter River” and the comical protests like “A Small Ode to Mixed Flatting”. And finally the pared-back poems of “Jerusalem Sonnets” and “Autumn Testament”, Baxter controlling himself and getting a focus.

So much to read here. So much to admire. Essential reading for sure. And portable.

 

Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“SPARKS AMONG THE STUBBLE”  by John Weir (Cold Hub Press, $NZ28); “SLIPS – Cricket Poems” by Mark Pirie (HeadworX, $NZ30 paperback; $NZ45 hardback); “SHELTER” by Kirsten Le Harivel (Cuba Press, $NZ25)

 

John Weir, priest and poet, published four collections of poetry between 1963 and 1983, but then his interests turned elsewhere. He has spent the last two decades editing the Complete Prose, Letters and Complete Poetry of James K. Baxter, his friend in earlier years. Sparks Among the Stubble is his first collection of poetry in nearly forty years. Let me say at once that I am very at home with it. Weir is a modernist who writes in a style that is instantly recognisable. His poems sit on the page in neatly-organised stanzas, his concerns are with literature… and eternity, and he is very accessible. No writing-school gimmickry here, thank you. And I settle in and read with both attention and great pleasure.

The title of this collection is found in the dedicatory quotation from the Book of Wisdom which tells us that when the Last Trump sounds, some will “run to and fro like sparks among the stubble”. We are tested and we die, some of us spectacularly, before eternity takes us. These themes hang over much of this collection.

Sparks Among the Stubble is arranged in four sections, which are not arbitrary but which strike four distinct notes

            The first tranche is very much preoccupied with imagery of gardens – where things grow – and simultaneously with images of the weight of age. In both “The Farm” and “Spring Day” there is a vivid but also wistful and slightly bittersweet recall of childhood. In “The Trench”, a wartime memory from schooldays conjures up a trench which grows over – in death we are in life. There are poems about the sea seen at twilight (the long day’s dying); and an earnest sequence called “In the Courtyard” which is not just about the perceived moment but which becomes a detailed reflection on ageing, lost dreams of youth, and (even in advanced age) the uncertainty of what’s to be. “I do not mean fate… that word which never had a meaning, / but the endless refining process / which fashions the true self out of what / we imagine we would rather be.” This sequence also remembers lost paths of youth when “smiling friends… urged us with deadly eloquence / to strive for what we never wanted.” The weight of age bears in on “A Visit to Cousin Jane”, which is almost a period piece about visiting an elderly cousin,  having tea and sandwiches and remembering the dead. It is also felt in “The Rite of Spring”, an ironic survey of the things, accumulated over the years, which come to clutter a house. Poems like these are weighty and detailed. In contrast, there is the ironic vignette “The Patriots”, on American over- enthusiasm, a poem which leads into other reflections on a visit to the USA.

The second tranche gathers together poems with a broader social perspective – they are nearly all written in the first person, “I” or the collective “we” which implicates all of us in history, dreams and personal mythology resonating over the years. Consider the sense of a whole family ageing and dying and the persistence of one odd anecdote (“One of the Family”) or a moment of quiet personal reflection (“The White Yacht”) or what is clearly a nightmare (“The Dream”). Then come the more public ones – the ones about history, like “The Negotiations”, where bureaucrats and statespeople huddle over plans that will probably accomplish no good; or “The Letter”, a vignette of an ancien regime cracking up; or “The Ambassadors”, an account of ambassadors from the colonial era who try to maintain an opulent European way of life in the midst of what they clearly regard as uncouth and barbarous countries. Perhaps the most wrenching poem for a priest to write would be “The Immigrants”, which considers both the way a new country gradually changes them, and the way, for good or ill, they have changed the country where “we taught them about the real God / who was a lot like us / but loved them just the same,” but who later have second thoughts about their missionary endeavour as they themselves are absorbed into the country and its culture.

The third tranche is, dare I say, where I am most at home – a collection of poems making critical or ironic or (less often) celebratory comments on well-known writers. Charlotte Bronte faces death and the loss of her siblings. John Ruskin is a riot of suppressed impulses. Ezra Pound and D.H.Lawrence are each summed up in a dismissive sonnet. Evelyn Waugh is a facetious young man filling his diary with airy gossip. Sinclair Lewis was an embittered literary bully. Edith Sitwell prepared for her death in a seemly and ceremonious way. Ernest Hemingway was a desperate and self-destructive man, playing a charade of manliness. Robert Lowell was an even more self-destructive (and mentally unbalanced) man. Thom Gunn’s (homoerotic) verse about bikies got damped down to sludge when California caught him. (Dear me, John Weir, you’re showing your age. Who nowadays has even heard of Thom Gunn?) No – I’ve been far more glib in this summary than John Weir is, but essentially these are his verdicts. I remember years ago having a bald, whiney-voiced tutor who hated W.H.Auden and made chastising comments about the way that poet filled in the moments when he lacked inspiration by writing sonnets about literary figures – Rimbaud, Edward Lear etc. This, apparently, was a very naughty thing for him to do. But I disagree. Criticism-as-biographic-poetry is a well-established genre. John Weir’s gallery of literati is a stimulating read, a charivari of biographical and literary criticism. I loved it. And I have to admit that in my own poetic practice I’ve written more than a few such literary side-bites.

The fourth and final tranche reverts to the personal. Much about death and memory. The death of an elderly friend (“At the Hospital”); memories that stretch back to childhood (“Grandmother”, “A Place by the Sea”) ; visiting a grave (“Too Late”); the death of an old man who had survived the First World War (“In Memory of Alfred Jenkin”); The death of a woman who collected stuffed toys (“The Toys”)  and a more public poem on the glitterati funeral of Yves Saint Laurent

The whole collection closes with an oddly tender poem dedicated to the inspired and demented Antonin Artaud. It reminds us that “In due time everything will become something else / because things are born not to be but to become.” A fitting envoi. See this as the launch pad to eternity if you wish.

John Weir writes with the authority of experience and the maturity of age. This is a solid and fruitful collection.

 

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Let me be quite honest about this. Sometimes I read collections of poetry for their sheer eccentricity, and sometimes I read collections of poetry that are aimed at a very specialised audience. Mark Pirie’s Slips – Cricket Poems meets both these criteria. It is aimed at lovers of the game of cricket – and I immediately have to admit that I am not one such. I think I saw part of a cricket match when I was at school. I can’t remember ever seeing the game again, apart from brief, unavoidable clips shown on the evening news. For the last 13 years, Mark Pirie has (as well as being a prolific publisher) contributed poems about cricket to a cricketing magazine, edited an anthology of cricket poems, and followed matches ardently. He is apparently besotted with the game. He would have to be, to produce the 130 pages of cricket that make up Slips.

Knowing virtually nothing about the game and its history, I enter this territory cautiously. Will I miss the arcane details of the game known only to cricketers? Will I fail to get the jokes about certain cricketers of whom I have never heard? Yes I will. But I soon find out that I’m not as ignorant as all that. Even I understand the technicalities outlined in the poem  “Eleven Ways of Being Dismissed”. And though I have to take on trust poems about cricketing stars like Ben Hollioake, Michael Clarke, Martin Guptill and others, I do know who Don Bradman, Freddie Trueman and Richard Hadlee were and – ahem – eons ago I did teach the late Martin Crowe at secondary school and occasionally saw what the press had to say about him. These players all feature in Slips – Cricket Poems. Mark Pirie is courteous and precise enough to offer footnotes to some poems, telling us which test-match and which teams he is referring to.

Let’s admit that some things in this collection would have been topical once to followers of cricket, but are now dated. One example – Pirie’s poem that comes nearest to a journalistic report, on how an international team fared, is “To McCullum’s Thirteen” which also (probably intentionally) reads like cheerful doggerel. At his best, though, Pirie can weave cricket into general concerns of human life. Where failure and disappointment are concerned, he brings into the poem “The Pavilion” the memorable lines “even the best of us / spends their time stuck in the pavilion”. Sometimes, too, cricket is simply the background for other reflections. “At Brown’s Bay” is a poem of remembered love, where cricket is mentioned only because the lovers walk past cricket pitches. “A Boy’s Song” uses cricket to echo (or parody) a poem by Ruth Dallas. Then there are wild flights of fantasy, such as “Space Cricket” (literally about extra-terrestrials joining in the game) and “Ice Cricket”, which sounds like a cricketer’s nightmare.

Pirie’s wittiest poem, “Islands of Cricket”, considers how cricket caught on with Indians in India in colonial times, but did not catch on with Maori in New Zealand. He manages to turn this into a cunning comment on colonialism as he does in the poem that immediately follows it, “The Reverse of Imperialism”. The final poem in the collection, “Cricket and Writing”, displays the same sort of wit.

There are a number of poems that have a nostalgic tone, such as the elegiac “Uncle Warwick” about an uncle who encouraged his interest in the game. “The Streaming Room” is  nice mixture of nostalgia and modernity as he considers how scorecards used to be tabulated and how the new world of electronics does it.  One poem now is now unintentionally ironic – indeed horribly ironic. This is “Cricket in Afghanistan”, which celebrates seeing cricket being played by Afghan children now the Taliban have gone.

As you can now see, there are many things in Slips – Cricket Poems that will resonate with non-cricketers such as I. But the core of it is detailed accounts of plays, their scores and the game itself. It is really for the specialist reader.

 

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From two seasoned campaigners to a newcomer. Shelter is the debut collection of Kirsten Le Harivel, Glaswegian-born and now, says the blurb, living on the Kapiti Coast (Gad! It seems that half our more offbeat poets live on the Kapiti Coast.) The 66 poems that make up this collection come in various forms – prose poems, poems short enough to be aphorisms, poems written in more traditional stanzaic forms. Very few stray beyond the single page. Kirsten Le Harivel likes to make it snappy, likes to stick to the point, likes to deal with the immediate moment, maybe even the epiphany.

Le Harivel has some major preoccupations which are the dominant themes of the collection. One is travel to foreign countries, seen in the poem “Volcanoes have the shortest names” which compares Scottish, Japanese and New Zealand volcanoes; or the anecdote that is “Digha, Bay of Bengal”; and towards the end of the collection a number of prose poems that also recall India.

Another theme is the condition of being a migrant, as in the prose poem “From One Migrant to Another”; or “When we came here”, which speaks of the quietness experienced in a New Zealand domicile in contrast with the constant noise of relatives back in Scotland. “From Loch Fyne with love” turns on a witty conceit of a Scottish fish-monger sending his wares to New Zealand and “Watermarks” is basically about years of adjusting to this country.

As one might expect, there are poems dealing with the perceived lot of women. “Submission” is a prose poem suggesting the inferior role women sometimes have to assume before men, while “Feminista” recalls a forceful woman of many skills who could act as a barista. Of course considering the sexes can also involve the subject of sex. “The bedroom” is written with a modishly assumed world-weariness as a list of bedroom behaviours including the words “fuck” and “fucking” more than any other text I’ve seen. (Sorry, luv, but the shock value of this has long since dissipated and it’s now a little passe ). The nearest Le Harivel comes to love poems are “If I could make a list” and “Pillow talk”, both of which are presented ironically, the standard stratagem of young people who cannot frankly admit their love.

It is understandable that there is at least some youthful angst in this collection, notably in “Butterflies”, a very sad first-person fantasia of self-denigration containing lines such as “I am a cement frog sculpture, /  my legs dangle into this abyss,  / a pond, full of water and plastic fish” and “I am a damaged buoy, floating in a turgid sea”. It is understandable, too, that there are some moments of social activism, as in “Kerikeri waterfall” which chastises locals for not knowing a Maori name.

Le Harivel generally writes with great clarity, whatever her guiding ideas might me. Only one poem is opaque and difficult to decode. This is “National identity project”, wherein, through four stanzas, she brings together various scientific concepts, extended imagery which apparently is designed to classify a certain sort of national chauvinism… or is it? An end-note says it was inspired by looking up the various definitions of “development” in the OED. Such concepts are usually a puzzle for the reader. This one certainly is. As for the totally unpunctuated poems, sans capital letters etc, “It runs through trees” and “You are an elegant thing” I shall pass them over as a current format.

I save the best for last. Le Harival excels in poems of childhood recall. Her most exuberant and relatable poem is “A Weegie lass”, a long-ish discursive account of being a young school-going, street-exploring, chips-eating Glaswegian girl. It is mainly a poem of raw remembrance and some joy, and I hope someday somebody has the wit to include it in an anthology. “After-school mothers” also remembers Glaswegian days. Her prose poem “The houses on our street are stuck together” is a rather more dispiriting account of re-visiting Glasgow as an adult. Many other poems turn on a Scottish childhood – and “Kilchattan Bay” is a more carefree adult return to Scotland.

As you might infer from the above, I am of two minds about this collection. While some poems work excellently, others seem more pedestrian or driven by current fashions in style. Even so, this is a very impressive debut and is, I hope, the beginning of a formidable career in poetry.

Something New

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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

 

“COMPLETE PROSE” by JAMES K. BAXTER, edited by JOHN WEIR (Victoria University Press, $200)

 

            I sometimes preface reviews on this blog with an elaborate apologia. When it comes to John Weir’s edition of the Complete Prose of James K. Baxter, I am obliged to give a particularly elaborate apologia. The Complete Prose was published late last year, and I am only now getting to deal with it.

            There are a number of reasons for this.

            First, given the scale and expense of this publication, I was diffident about requesting a review copy from Victoria University Press. I am extremely grateful to VUP that, when I at last plucked up courage to request one, they generously provided it. But it took me some months to work up the nerve.

Second, this is a formidably long publication, and as you should know by now, I do not review things without actually reading them. To read my way through the Complete Prose has taken me – on and off – a number of months. John Weir’s edition consists of four large hardback volumes, presented as a boxed set. The cover of the box is illustrated with a triptych of original paintings, by Nigel Brown, of Baxter in his later bearded phase. Each volume has a handy ribbon-bookmark. The first three volumes are Baxter’s prose (i.e. articles, reviews, sermons, letters-to-the-editor, prose stories – but not personal letters), presented chronologically. The last volume (all 592 pages of it) is John Weir’s apparatus criticus. A publisher’s flyer tells me that the whole set amounts to 2662 pages. John Weir, poet, critic, academic and Catholic priest, was a close friend of Baxter’s for the last decade of so of Baxter’s life. He has frequently written about Baxter, has edited other posthumous collections of Baxter’s work and collaborated in a complete bibliography of all Baxter’s writings. It is highly unlikely that, having spent years on this project, he has omitted anything of significance.

But where does a reader begin?

I was tempted to follow my usual practice by beginning at the beginning and ending at the end. But in this case, noting that Weir’s Introduction was in Volume 4, I began with Volume 4 – and I think this is where the wise reader should begin. To break it down like a conscientious bibliographer, Volume 4 consists of the whole table of contents for all four volumes; a 151-page Introduction by John Weir which is, in effect, a biography of Baxter and a critical overview of his work; Acknowledgements; a “Note” in the form of an elegy Weir wrote in 1972 at the time of Baxter’s death; an 11-page Chronology of Baxter’s life; and then the bulk of Volume 4 – 250 pages of Notes and References, essentially the endnotes to the first three volumes. Weir suggests that readers should have this volume open at the relevant pages when reading anything in the first three volumes. Wise advice. They illuminate much (especially in the way of topical references and events in Baxter’s relationships) that would be obscure in reading Baxter’s prose. If I have a minor criticism, it is that occasionally Weir seems intent on explaining things that probably don’t needs explaining – for example the notes telling us in detail who each of the following people were – Emily Dickinson (p.217); Billy Graham (p.271); Graham Greene (pp.282-283); Pope John XXIII (p.311). Or am I assuming a “general knowledge” that does not really exist?

After the Notes and References comes a 9-page Glossary of Maori terms; 90 pages giving short biographies of writers and critics who were Baxter’s contemporaries; 25 pages of Select (!!!) Bibliography and 40 pages of small-type, double-columned Index.

In all this it was naturally Weir’s 151-page Introduction that I read with most interest. It begins as straight biography – the parentage and unhappy childhood and schooling of the young sin-obsessed, sex-obsessed James Keir Baxter. His father Archibald’s strong moral example as a pacifist. His more tense relationship with his mother. Then the marvellous boy who had his first collection of poems published when he was 18 and who immediately appeared in Allen Curnow’s Caxton anthology and was hailed by Curnow as the salvation of New Zealand poetry. (At this point in the story I always wonder – though Weir doesn’t – what a negative influence this premature recognition might have had on young Baxter’s future development.) There follow the bohemian years, the student years, the casual-labour years and the long, long hell of alcoholism, with endless boozing and much verbal abuse of others and much shagging. Baxter becomes an Anglican. More acclaimed volumes of poetry appear. Baxter lays off the booze when he joins Alcoholics Anonymous in the mid-1950s. But Baxter keeps shagging, despite the fact that when he was 22 he married the 21-year-old Jacquie Sturm. As with other accounts, this part of the story always leaves my sympathies with Jacquie. She, as a Maori, certainly raised Baxter’s consciousness about Maori culture. But he was at best a neglectful husband, often leaving her and their two children to fend for themselves while he was off on his bohemian rambles and (frequently enough to be worthy of note) seducing other women.  In the late 1950s, despite the publication of what amounted to his first “collected poems”, he feared his poetic powers were waning. In 1958, aged 32, he became a Catholic.

And here I have to note something distinctive about Weir’s Introduction. Up to (approximately) Baxter’s conversion to Catholicism, Weir’s account of Baxter’s life is a third-person account culled from other sources. But the bohemian-poet and the priest-poet became friends in 1961. After this point Weir’s account is as much first-person memoir and reminiscence as it is biography of Baxter. There are long quotations from Baxter’s letters to Weir and from (unpublished) poems which Baxter sent Weir. As a conscientious priest, Weir takes Baxter’s Catholicism very seriously. He presents Baxter as a man on a profound spiritual quest – in his social criticism, in his years writing apologetic articles for the Catholic weekly The Tablet, and of course in his final Jerusalem years. By this stage Baxter had morphed into the bearded barefoot prophet, now one of the iconic images of New Zealand in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It all ends when Baxter dies of a heart attack in 1972, aged only 46.

Obviously not everybody interprets Baxter’s last years as benignly as Weir does. By the 1960s, former admirers like Allen Curnow and Denis Glover were (occasionally publicly, but more often privately) dismissing Baxter as a poseur, mountebank and religious hypocrite. Endless were the stories one heard of the rosary-reciting sexual exploiter, with Baxter cast as a kind of Kiwi Rasputin. Part of this at least arose from Baxter’s bad taste in becoming a Catholic – something very offensive to agnostic academe. Weir acknowledges (p.122) the type of sarcastic things that were said, by the likes of Frank Sargeson, at the time of Baxter’s death. Weir himself comes closer to accepting the “Saint Hemi” image.

Even so, Weir is an astute critic and an honest reporter, despite his personal interest. Committed to a full account of Baxter’s life and work, he can’t ignore the grubby and questionable stuff (Baxter’s sexual frustrations and bouts of shagging; Baxter’s, in his Jerusalem years, fathering a child on a young woman half his age) and he is not starry-eyed about everything Baxter wrote. For example, of the man’s third collection The Fallen House (1953), Weir remarks:

“There was a great deal of power and urgency in the poetry, sometime to its detriment, for it could sound like a rhetorical sermon delivered by a man who knew the answers rather than the musings of someone who understood that there might not be any.” (p.42)

When he comes to Baxter’s prose, the occasion of this publication, Weir notes:

“The quality of [Baxter’s] prose writing is uneven. It is strongest when he is emotionally involved with his topic and when his language sounds most like his speaking voice. He always needed an audience and wrote best when he had a particular person in mind.”(p.124)

Weir says that Baxter’s prose is essentially concerned with five topics: “himself; the nature of literature and art; spirituality and religion; social injustice; and, a thread of this, the plight of Maori.” (p.124) In explaining how he came to finalise the contents of these four volumes (pp.147-149), he notes that this collection does not include Baxter’s plays (which have already appeared in a collected edition). Weir also says that he hesitated to include the Catholic apologetic articles which Baxter wrote for The Tablet, given that Baxter later repudiated them for their bland tone and simplistic theology. (They were once gathered together in a volume called The Flowering Cross). In the end, however, Weir decided to include them.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   * 

Thus far, I have done no more than to explain how these four volumes are presented to us, and what their scholarly editor has done. I have not got to the heart of the matter, which is Baxter’s prose itself. I am tempted to deal with this in great detail, but (with regret, discarding many notes I have made over the last few months) I will restrain myself, attempt to be brief and try to deal with the three volumes in a few concise paragraphs each.

The 771 pages of Volume 1 take us from 1943 to 1965 (Baxter between the ages of 17 and 39), being Baxter’s last years in Dunedin and Christchurch and then his 16-year sojourn in Wellington. Note that this volume covers fully 22 years, whereas the second and third volumes combined cover a mere six years. In this volume we first meet Baxter as the schoolboy trying his hand at lyrical prose description. He rapidly becomes the confident 20-year-old student methodically planning “Notes for ‘Poetry in New Zealand’ ” (pp.13-14) and reviewing Frank Sargeson and Henry Lawson in student magazines. He makes his first halting attempts at short stories. As the volume later proves, Baxter never became master of this form, but some of his experiments were interesting, even if in stories like “The Mathesons at Home” (pp.274-281) and the quasi-autobiographical “To Have and To Hold” (pp.287-292) he is rather too eager to reach a moralising punchline. His unfinished (and frankly botched) “novel” Horse, which was published posthumously, is given in its entirety (pp.529-589). I followed the editor’s advice throughout my reading by having the relevant “Notes and References” of Volume 4 open for each item in the earlier volumes. John Weir notes that Horse was clearly influenced by Dylan Thomas’s Adventures in the Skin Trade. One thing that surprised me as I read Volume 1, was how much Baxter in the 1950s was besotted by Thomas. As Weir notes, Baxter’s play Jack Winter’s Dream stood in the shadow of Under Milk Wood, and there are frequent references to, and apologia for, Dylan Thomas in Baxter’s criticism. Another surprise was Baxter’s respect for Edith Sitwell, about whom he wrote a long, appreciative piece in 1965 (pp.693-701). Weir wonders shrewdly if Baxter’s positive view wasn’t in part influenced by the fact that Sitwell, like Baxter himself, was by then a Catholic convert. For me, another surprise was Baxter’s competence when it came to straight reportage, as in his “Akitio: A Country School and Its Community” (pp.330-343), written for an educational journal. Similar intelligent factual observation is also found in his diary jottings and brief pieces of journalism when he visited India and other points in Asia in the late 1950s.

Much of Baxter’s prose in the 1950s and early 1960s consists of routine, jobbing book-reviewing, with short notices written for the Listener and lengthier ones for the likes of Landfall. Much of this is undistinguished literary journalism, with Baxter often enough using a book under review as the pretext for discussing something that interests him.

Two trends, however, stand out.

First, there is Baxter’s emergence as social critic. In a Listener review of 1951, he suggests that M.K.Joseph’s iconoclastic “Secular Litany” “should be nailed on every schoolroom wall”. (p.64) He begins to discuss the Maori condition earnestly with the 1953 article “Is There a Colour Bar in New Zealand?” (pp.124-126). Of course he is always ready to take swings at “puritanism” and censorship, he frequently campaigns for tolerance for homosexuals, and he follows his father’s moral example in regular criticism of militarism and Cold War rhetoric. In all this, social criticism becomes wedded to his religious concerns as he accepts Catholicism and begins to discuss regularly theological matters (often – as the endnotes point out – with John Weir).

Second, there are his detailed examinations of New Zealand poetry, beginning with his Adult Education lectures and his “Recent Trends in New Zealand Poetry” in 1951 and continuing through The Fire and the Anvil, the whole text of which is given here. (pp.145-198). His key statement on New Zealand poetry is made in his 1961 review of Allen Curnow’s Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse. The review is presented here under the heading “The Kiwi and Mr Curnow” (pp.438-442) and shows Baxter striking out against Curnow’s “intense preoccupation with landscape poetry, time and the cult of isolation.” This is his definitive repudiation of Curnow’s melancholy version of “nationalism” which saw New Zealand Pakeha as aliens in an alien land.

One thing that often struck me while ploughing through Volume 1 was how different New Zealand then was, and how controversies were often raised over matters that would now not raise a comment. It is extraordinary, for example, that in 1960 Baxter felt obliged to write two letters to the press (pp.419 and 421) defending the (very mild) satirical songs of the American Tom Lehrer against the charges of obscenity and immorality.

I have one quibble about the editor’s decisions in this first volume. Clearly Baxter’s contributions to the publication New Zealand in Colour consisted of detailed captions to photographs. We are given 30 pages of these captions (pp.485-514), which may be appropriate if utter completeness was the editor’s aim but which is odd if they are presented without the images and hence shorn of much of their meaning.

All 712 pages of Volume 2 deal with the two years (1966-68) when Baxter returned to his native Dunedin as Burns Fellow, and then worked for the Catholic diocese and wrote his apologetic articles for the Catholic publications The Tablet and the Marist Messenger. Not to beat about the bush, I found this volume the most difficult to plough through and I suspect, given the heavy weight of Catholic apologetics, this will be the verdict of many other readers. The Tablet articles that became The Flowering Cross are usually from a “left” Catholic perspective. In them, Baxter raises such heavyweight issues as alcoholism; the church’s attitude towards trade unions, unemployment and workers’ rights; what is wrong with pietistic Catholic literature; compassion and support for homosexuals and so on. Frequently he crosses swords in letters columns with more conservative Catholic supporters of the Vietnam War, which Baxter vigorously opposes. Surprisingly, perhaps, in both the Catholic press and in letters to general newspapers and to the New Zealand Listener, Baxter supports the papal teaching against artificial contraception. In both the apologetic articles and the letters-to-the-editor on these issues there is much repetition, interesting though some individual observations are.

Far more engaging in these years are his articles and essays on poetry. Drafts of his talks on poetry (pp.43-95) are still among the sanest and clearest overviews of thematic development in New Zealand poetry from the 1920s to the 1960s, even if they are suffused with much autobiography. His analyses of both Curnow’s verse and the status of Landfall at that time are still spot-on. More uneven are the Burns Fellowship lectures on poetry that were gathered together and published in 1967 as The Man on the Horse (pp.129-243). There is much autobiography, much meandering away from his set topics and (dare I say it) much fruitless speculation on the place of Catholics in New Zealand literature. But the lengthy reading of “Tam O’Shanter”, which gives the collection its title, is robust, vigorous and shows Baxter really trying to connect poetic practice with a popular voice. The reflections continue in Aspects of Poetry in New Zealand (pp.325-353), which is dedicated to John Weir.

And yet truly, as Weir says in his (Volume 4) Introduction, “the quality of [Baxter’s] prose writing is uneven”. When we force ourselves to read all 24 pages (pp.20-43) of Baxter’s arts festival talk “Shots Around the Tiger” we are intermittently amused, but eventually bored, by Baxter’s scattershot of doggerel, deliberate provocation and grains of real social comment. His introductions to his plays, his support of a local theatre and his frequent praise for Patric Carey’s endeavours at the Globe are all admirable but – oh dear! – see how Baxter is at his very worst in his 1967 talk “Some Possibilities for New Zealand Drama” (pp.476-492), which mixes Utopian visionary hopes with windy rhetoric as he imagines a future New Zealand drama which will somehow feed off a sense of liturgy.

And then there is the sort of rhetoric, which automatically alienates many. Dramatically casting himself in the role of prophet, Baxter has a dream calling him to Jerusalem and writes a letter (pp.569-571) to the Catholic Bishops of New Zealand which begins “From Hemi the charismatic, the nobody, the dead man, who is also the Seed” and continues very much in the same self-dramatising vein.

Which brings us to the 584 pages of Volume 3 . This is the final phase, the “Jerusalem Years” (1969-72), with Baxter trying (and frankly failing) to separate himself from the literary life and run a commune for young dropouts at Jerusalem; and then returning (a little chastened and disillusioned) to Auckland and dying. Baxter’s social perspectives in these years are very much the same as they were in the mid-1960s, but – at least in small doses - this last volume is more readable than Volume 2 because it is more often angry and engaged. Baxter is still immersed in religion. He writes two long series of “Letters to a Priest”, all of them signed “Hemi” (pp.79-110 and pp.134-155). He does a form of social work among junkies in Grafton in Auckland and writes many articles of advocacy for them, including his long submission to a Committee on Drug Dependency and Drug Abuse (pp.73-78). Baxter is far more engaged with Maori, entering into dialogue with Nga Tamatoa and trying to reach deeper into the culture at Jerusalem on the Wanganui.

While he still contributes many book reviews to the New Zealand Listener, he himself now becomes the object of popular journalistic enquiry. John Weir chooses to include in this volume many articles, profiles and interviews written by journalists about Baxter. (Many are from the major dailies but a surprising number are from the Wanganui Chronicle, which would have been nearest to the Jerusalem commune.) We are given various drafts of Baxter’s Jerusalem Daybook about life on the commune, including the final published article (pp.294-341). There are still anti-war articles as the Vietnam War continues, and there are (sometimes in the Catholic press, sometimes not) Baxter’s rancorous arguments with his fellow Catholics. In a 1970 newspaper report “Poet Warns Against Seeking Possessions” (p.202), Baxter is quoted as saying “The Church is Catholic – universal – for all the people, yet it has given the Maori a European God. They will lose the Maori as they lost the working classes in France.” He is never slow to tell Catholics that they are Pharisaical, bourgeois and apparently lacking the spark, vision and lively spirituality that James K. Baxter himself possesses. Frequently Baxter curses New Zealand for having “a secular Trinity – the Dollar Note, Respectability, and the School Cert. exam.” (The phrase turns up in various articles – at pp.129-134; pp.181-182; and p.224). In other words, we are materialistic, class-bound and stifled by unimaginative formal education.

Baxter in these years was capable of the analytical lucidity that he had earlier brought to his long articles on New Zealand poetry. You can see this in a long interview he did with John Weir (pp.356-365) in which he calmly dissects his own public image, and answers pointed questions, as when Weir asks “[in using mythological references and imagery] are you not going against your stated position of reflecting the world as it is?”

But as I have said judiciously above, this third volume is bracing to read “in small doses”. The fact is, much of Baxter’s vigorous polemic in these years becomes oppressive and repetitive. Indeed, it becomes rant. As he curses and excoriates bourgeois and capitalist society, Baxter will every so often drop in a phrase telling us that he is no Marxist and that he is guided by Jesus. But there is a fearful naivete to much that he writes – a readiness to assume that people can be neatly categorised as humane or inhumane, truly Christian or sham Christian, middle-class or “authentic”. There is little nuance, little middle ground. He often enough condemns old puritanical theologies (Calvinist or Jansenist) that threatened people with hellfire, yet he clearly sees the world as divided into the saved and the damned.

If you wish to see him at his worst, look at his “Militancy in the Schools” (pp.558-562), supposedly about education, which begins “If you are happy at school, it may be a sign you are a volkwit [tee hee] who would be happy in Buchenwald.” It continues in much the same hysterical vein. There is little room for nuance in later Baxter’s prose and frankly there is little exercise of real charity, except to those whom Baxter has anointed as his comrades.

How do I sum up this boxed set of (nearly) all the prose that Baxter wrote, outside private letters? It is a titanic job of editing. It is a job that will not have to be done again. If anyone requires book-and-verse for Baxter’s views on literature and on a whole range of social issues, they will find it here. John Weir has produced a colossal piece of work. Not only are we reminded of the sheer volume of Baxter’s writing, but we are reminded of how good he was as a critic – especially of New Zealand poetry. His critical art was one of engagement – trying to connect poetry to the popular voice, not getting mired in academic technicalities, and showing a thorough insider knowledge of what he was talking about.

But, though I have read my way through these volumes, I would not advise other readers to do so. Baxter’s Complete Prose would be better approached as a work of reference. When read in toto, one finds that too many of the same themes are struck again and again. In his later stages, Baxter’s polemic becomes shrill. His simplifications grate. I would accept that, for all his posturing and self-dramatising, Baxter was set on a genuine spiritual journey (which is treated with reverence by Weir). His views on Maori were a couple of decades ahead of other Pakeha thinking. But too often he wrote as if he were the only person in the land enlightened enough to see the dangers of materialism and monoculturalism. Suburb-dwellers are repeatedly demonised. A Manichaean dichotomy rules in his thinking and one’s head is done in.

A Small and Possibly Presumptuous Footnote: In reading all the collected prose of James K. Baxter, and especially reading the notes in the 4^th volume, I was surprised at the number of times literals render 20^th century dates as 19^th century ones.  For example, in Volume 4, Note 465, p.348, we are told that T.S.Eliot lived with John Hayward from “1846” to “1857”, when obviously 1946 to 1957 is intended. There are other examples of this particular glitch.