pam brown reviews new zealand poetry for overland in 1997

8/10/2019 Pam Brown Reviews New Zealand Poetry for Overland in 1997

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Round lonely islands rolled:Isles nigh as empty as their deep,Where men but talk of gold and sheep

And think of sheep and gold . . .

The colonist replies that he can't return.It's not thathe's content in NZ but because England itself haschanged -

For is my England there ? Ah, no.

Gone is my England,long ago .. .

To move on to discover how or whether poets follow-ing on into the century content can be , most of MaryUrsula Bethell's poems in r9z9 use the garden as thebase from which she gazes. She relates the presenceof a more dramatic landscape just beyond the fenceof the cultivator:

When I am very earnest$ diggingI Iift my head sometimes, and look at the mountains,

. . . how freely the wild grasses flower there,How grandly the storm-shaped trees are massed

in their gorgesAnd the rain-worn rocks strewn in magnificent

heaps...

It is only a little while since this hillside

their chicks from bluish-green eggs, all the whileelegant themselves

in dorsal aigrettes, nuptial plumage. They arenot

rnzn1r: the survivor chicks are also few.

We dreamed we won the land . . .now we wake, and knowthe land won us a long long time

' an age ago

And Cilla McQueen laments a damaged landscape in'The Mess We Made at Port Chalmers':

Tongue-stump of headland bandaged withconcrete,

Obliterated beaches stacked with chopsticks.

All of this takes place in shallow time.

In deep time, the trees have already recoveredthe hills

and the machines rust, immobile, flaking away.Healing, the land has shifted in its sleep.

All we would see if we were hereis seed-pods moving on the water.

My first response to NZ poets is that they are like 'us'


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Wystan Curnow is a witty and exemplary minimalistin an extract from'Cancer Daybook':

Now thatIhave it

(death)in mysentence

I'm themorecomposed.

David Eggleton presents a breathless, dense mono-logue that is totally different from but as performa-tive as Alan Brunton's more concrete and mildlyirreverent piece:

IT IS RAINING(il pleut pleut pleut) at Fayette St and Green (mon dieu -il pleut some more)( )

inBaltimore...

Bernadette Hall is subtly abstract in Anorexia':

i h f

and watch the Martian invaders,already appalled by our language,pointing at what they want.

Readers expect or presume a general map, an organ-ized set of cultural-historical clues, and althoughoften there are beneficial documentary aspects, an-thology syndrome produces symptoms of reverencein readers, and scepticism and an occasional sense ofconspiracyin poets. Perhaps the American poet DavidAntin's oft-quoted quip that anthologies are to poetsas zoos are to animals is pertinent.

Unless the anthology is thematic (and in Australiathere's a surfeit of thematic prose anthologies) mostanthologists strive for a representative eclecticismthat their task renders unattainable by its inherent,or latent, hegemonic cast. In fact, to attempt a defini-tive selection seemsfutile with so manyimpedimentslurking in the process - complex juxtapositions ofpoems, chronological restriction, the amount of pagespace meted out and so on. All of this has a neutraliz-ing effect, and despite the best intentions, notions of'quality'or aesthetic requirements become the deter-minant - the poetry is subdued by the context. Theanthologist seems compelled to tidy up and so usu-ally revises whatever the'live' version of poetry mightbe or have been to suit current tastes, ideologies andso on. As the Sydney academic and columnist, DonAnderson has pointed out Dorothea Mackellar's fa-


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There are productive tensions in magazines whichreflect diversity in a way anthologies do not. Continu-ally shifting editorial ideas, issue after issue, provideIess formulaic samples. Although carefully consideredby editors and designers, a magazine s apparentlyextemporary edge permits fractiousnes s, experimen_tation - poetry which can t always be tidied. Somemagazines also practise a dismissive use of poems asspace-fillers. If economics allow, a magazine,s ongo-ingness furnishes a continuing forum for a miscel-

lany of writings and critical anxieties that intersectin unpredictable ways. More like a hybrid collage thanan authentic representation, a magazine, these days,suits the economy of attention of the contemporarycultural moment. Magazines publish the latest poemsand often publish newer andyounger as-yet-unanth-ologized poets. Some of these poets may never be in-cluded in anthologies. Some

may not be intent on a poetic career or a niche in a canon. Some may giveup writing poetry. Looking back through a range ofmagazines there are unanthologized and no-longer-practising poets who represented the trends andideas of the times better than some of their contem-poraneous poets who, by luck, by fluke, by charm, orby simple persistence hung in there long enough tobe anthologized. As Laurie Duggan says in Well youNeedn t :

maybe it s enough to grow oldrefusing to go away.. .

ENDNOTES

r. Vrncent O Sulhvan and Hone Tuwhare declinedparticipatlon. Then Kerr Hulme, Witr Ihimaera and AlbertWendt withdrew their work

z Mark Williams rn Meanjin 53, No. 4,tgg4.3 Hone Tuwhare, To a Maori Figure Cast in Bronze Outside

the Chief Post Office, Auckland .

4.Prior to this anthology I had read only

Mrchele Leggott(well known for her work on Lours Zukofsky),lennyBornholdt, Gregory O Brien, Drnah Hawken, Bill Minhire,Elizabeth Smither, Janet Charman, Robert Sullivan, KeriHulme, Janet Frame, Katherine Mansfield, Albert Wendtand James Baxter. And I had heard of Sam Hunt, IanWedde, Lauris Edmond, Allen Curnow and C.K. Stead

5. The glaring omission of TTO and Dipti Saravanamuttufrom all anthologies is an example.

6. Quentin Pope (ed.): Kowhai Gotd,Dent,London, r93o. Kowhai is a native plant.

7 Behind The Lines, Sydney Momtng Herald, 14 June 1997

Pam Brown has been included in and excluded fromvarious anthologies. She would like to thank New Zea-Iand poets Tom Beard and Wystan Curnow for somelocal

information and to an expatriate, Su Hanfling,forher help with Maori language. Her twelfth booh of po-etry is 5o-5o (Little Esther books).

pam brown reviews new zealand poetry for overland in 1997

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