Reviewed by Denys Trussell
To this Intercolonial adds the concept of Australasia. Oliver is a trans-Tasman
citizen, well placed because of his long residence in each country to speak of
the Australasian. And he avoids the deflation that is in our lamentable name
for the sea that separates us—the ditch. It is a naming that tells far too much
of just how little we laconic Pakeha have understood that sea. Oliver realises
it in its full power—no ditch, but a phenomenon of ecological and mythological
richness, of great beauty and terrifying power.
All this is pretty solid content and allows for a poem that can
develop beyond the subjectivity of the poet. Its words and its narratives
become an artifact with a life of its own, dealing with worlds far larger than
the solitary ego of the poet. It avoids the pitfalls of personal lyrics that
can degenerate quickly into narcissism. And the territory covered by Intercolonial is sufficiently large and varied
not to be parochial or excessively regional. The ‘supra-nation’ within which it
moves is full of human complexities, peculiarities. This is not a nationalist
epic. Nor is it the ‘trans-nationalism’ of which we hear so much. That is a
purely commercial construct. It is rather, an imaginative structure that
reveals the many sizes, the many scales of life lived, of nature in action, in
the Southwest Pacific.
As land-masses Australia and New Zealand are dramatic opposites:
the one immense, largely flat, stable, of great antiquity; the other, literally
Australia’s ‘outwash child’, much smaller, young, turbulent, largely
mountainous. Both arise from the parent material of Gondwanaland. These
contrasts are well realised in the poem:
“the northbound continent, rusty red
and adrift
carrying deep in her Jurassic hold a
cargo of two million
year old water, shadowy as a
birthmark, and the Great Artesian
Basin occupying (one fifth) the
stony hull of that continent.”
New Zealand, represented principally by its central region, is
seen as emergent in the hands of:
“Hao-whenua, ‘earth-wrecker’ hard
riding that
quake breakneck through the Holocene
and post-glacial ages,
7000 years in his wake, the
Wairarapa and Wellington
fault lines wrapped around his
wrists, tight as bush lawyer,
pulling first at one, then the
other, lifting basement blocks
in a grand tilt under the Great
Harbour of Tara . . .”
The poem is not just geophysics however. It jumps to the opposite,
‘unearthed’ extreme of the dream, and to the metamorphosis of the ‘real’ in the
imagination. Thomas McCormack, an historical figure who happens also to have
been the poet’s great-grandfather, is a nineteenth century ‘intercolonial’ who
dreams in order
“to capture past worlds or those yet
to come”
as
he voyages between New Zealand and Australia. His dreaming reaches back to an
ancestral Ireland that is rich with its own mythos, and projects forward to
take in ecological disasters in the making, such as the gigantic gyres of
plastic that are increasingly choking our oceans.
The other big dreamer is Kupe. He not only finds our present islands,
but envisions submarine structure, the geological past, and travels in his
dream-self over the tops of mountains:
“Kupe saw thousands of years back/
forward in an instant.
Glaciers, white larvae eating out
the U-shaped valleys,
had barely contracted-expanded one
arm’s length before his
stunned senses could turn thought to
memory into question.”
thereby
representing the first human perception of New Zealand.
All this needs language much less minimalist than that of the vers libre that has dominated poetry for
many decades. Founded on the succinctness of haiku, this idiom has limitations
in writing extensive works. It has become a convention, as I discovered when
giving a reading from Archipelago. I was sombrely warned by one of my peers after the event that I
“would be punished” for the more expansive style I had used. So far, punishment
has been unevenly, if not ineffectually applied. It is good therefore to
welcome Oliver’s poem into the canon of a more elaborated language style in the
knowledge that it is accomplished enough to survive any punishments that might
be applied . . . .
Along with the big dreams Intercolonial has significant sections based on the poet’s childhood and
adolescence spent high on the hillsides of Brooklyn, Wellington. These
experiences act as anchor ropes tying the dream-kites down to the ground of
actuality in a particular life. The last episode of this kind, printed in
italics as a kind of chorus, reflects on the life and death of the poet’s
father. It is an interesting variant on the unpunctuated poetic stream with
which Molly Bloom finished James Joyce’s Ulysses. Its layout as verse adds a new dimension to the ‘stream’.
The poem is cast entirely in quatrains with long, un-metred,
un-rhyming lines. Because of the sheer amount of data in it, there is pressure
on these lines to become prose; a pressure that is largely resisted, offset by
the density of metaphor which keeps the prosaic at bay and the poetics moving.
Sometimes the poet pushes his luck. The first line of the poem is, for me, one
of the least successful. “Tusked cauliflowers and herded carrots” is a tough
opener, and I wondered about its accuracy in imagistic terms. I went to my
nearest greengrocer and checked for tusk-like structures on cauliflowers. There
were none. However, the next day I was in another greengrocer who had not
trimmed the outer greenery off the heads of the cauliflowers. I saw that there
were curved, thick, pale green, tuskish fingers curving up from the base of the
head. I had to concede, but I am still unconvinced by the line, perhaps because
it does not quite work melodically for me. I rest my case. I find the rest of
Oliver’s imagery successful, accurate and telling. Don’t be put off by that
first line. The other thirteen hundred-odd have plenty of felicities that make Intercolonial a poem of substance, a good and
satisfying read.
Production by John Denny’s Auckland-based Puriri Press is excellent.
Puriri
Press / contact details: http://www.puriripress.co.nz.
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