broadsheet new new zealand poetry

Issue No. 6, November 2010

Editor: Mark Pirie

THE NIGHT PRESS WELLINGTON

/ 1 Poems copyright 2010, in the names of the individual contributors

Published by The Night Press

Cover drawing of Alistair Paterson by Una Platts, c1980s

broadsheet is published twice a year in May and November

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ISSN 1178-7805 (Print) ISSN 1178-7813 (Online)

Essay on Alistair Paterson copyright Siobhan Harvey 2010

Please Note: At this stage no submissions will be read. The poems included are solicited by the editor. All submissions will be returned. Thank you.

2 / Contents

PREFACE / 5

RAEWYN ALEXANDER / 6

OWEN BULLOCK / 7

JENNIFER COMPTON / 8

RIEMKE ENSING / 10

ANNE FRENCH / 11

WILL LEADBEATER / 12

MICHAEL MORRISSEY / 13

ALISTAIR PATERSON / 15

MARK PIRIE / 21

VIVIENNE PLUMB / 22

RON RIDDELL / 23

JACK ROSS / 24

IAIN SHARP / 27

ELIZABETH SMITHER / 31

BARRY SOUTHAM / 32

ESSAY FEATURE / 34

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS / 40

/ 3 Acknowledgements

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editors and publishers of the following collections and magazines where the following poems in this issue first appeared:

Jennifer Compton: ‘I’m putting together a programme of your poetry for the ABC’ from Aroha (Flarestack Publishing, UK, 1998).

Alistair Paterson: ‘Song for Celia’ from Arena, No. 79, July 1973 (Handcraft Press: Pukerua Bay); and ‘Safely perhaps, the Alamo’ from Evergreen Review online, No. 124, September 2010.

4 / Preface

Except for a brief period in the late fifties and early sixties Alistair Paterson has been writing poetry for 60 years in this country and for close on 30 years has been editing literary journals, encouraging and nurturing numerous literary talents. He is one of our most distinguished poets and editors, known internationally and respected by literary scenes in America, Australia, Europe and the UK. His ‘open form’ anthology 15 Contemporary New Zealand Poets published by Grove Press, USA/Pilgrims South Press, Dunedin is in around 200 libraries worldwide according to WorldCat, the online library catalogue. It’s one of the very few New Zealand anthologies to have succeeded overseas. In 1976, he organised American poet Robert Creeley’s influential visit to New Zealand. In 2006, in recognition of his achievements, he received the ONZM for services to literature. It’s both a privilege and a pleasure to be able to feature Alistair’s work in broadsheet. I have included mostly new work by Paterson, along with one rare and uncollected poem, ‘Song for Celia’, which I came across recently in an old issue of Noel Hoggard’s Arena magazine, 1973. The Arena poem gives a sense of his earlier lyrical impulse, while Paterson’s new poems continue his contemporary concerns, philosophical, witty and highly intelligent. One poem has already appeared in the highly regarded Evergeen Review in America edited by former Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset. As well I commissioned an essay by Siobhan Harvey, one of our most thoughtful and observant critics. Her essay focuses on Paterson’s 1973 collection Birds Flying. Many of the book’s individual poems as Harvey points out continue to be well anthologised and have retained their power over nearly 40 years. As Harvey suggests: further overviews of the book and Paterson’s work are long overdue. Alongside Paterson’s poetry, I’ve invited some of his friends to be in the issue with him. This is something unique to broadsheet. In the past I’ve featured Louis Johnson, Ruth Gilbert and Harvey McQueen. It’s nice to accord this sense of recognition to writers who have truly given their lifetime to literature. Johnson, Gilbert, McQueen and Paterson all fall into this category. Thanks to those who sent positive thoughts while I was putting together this issue of broadsheet. I appreciate your contribution to making this a special issue for Alistair and myself. Enjoy.

Mark Pirie Wellington, November 2010 / 5 Raewyn Alexander

W H A T I S A S T A R ?

Oh now, a star like Madonna has glittery toothpaste of course and they sleep on a cloud not on a bed, while people follow them about and sell images for swimming pools and fast cars. Then if one sadly dies like Michael Jackson, well, complete strangers throw themselves at hairdressers and weep real gold, or silver, depending how much of a star the star was, naturally. Some stars forget what a drug really is, how it alters consciousness so much. Judy Garland was given pills as a child; then some forget taking too much can kill. Even if they know the dangers sober, drifted into a netherworld where facts are tricks instead. Karen Carpenter was anorexic and that killed her, well, her bro’ said she would’ve probably been that way with or without the fame. I think River Phoenix would’ve probably taken too many drugs with or without the fame, too. Not that we may ever know this, except I do have a phone line to heaven, but the line is down right now, and their call centre help-line is hell.

6 / Owen Bullock

R U E S T D E N I S drinks his vin rouge speaking loudly to himself moves on, gesticulating to the next cafe bums a cigarette, tears off the filter, demands a lighter begins smoking, offers the lighter back on open palm, starts talking with the young couple at the table is still there...

L A M B E T H an old woman at the cocktail bar wearing a Police Department T-shirt machine guns on the wall revolutionary posters in Spanish chillie-shaped light bulbs and much slicing of lemons fresh flowers on the tables white and yellow chrysanthemums

/ 7 Jennifer Compton

I ’ M P U T T I N G A P R O G R A M M E O F Y O U R P O E T R Y T O G E T H E R F O R T H E A B C

(for Alistair Paterson)

I’m writing about you as if you were a poet.

Someone who is born and will die. (But not yet.)

I’m writing the narrative to go between your poems.

And choosing them, which of them Australia will hear.

One Sunday afternoon. Next year. I’m writing down the events in your life.

In order. To place you for the people who may (or may not) be listening to you.

(I won’t be mentioning your raw silk jacket, you standing in the rain, walking slowly together up Plimmer Steps, the way your eyes furrow, your shining pain.)

I’m writing down the events that may (or may not) have caused the poetry in your life.

Or has the poetry caused the events?

8 / I’m making it all neat like a poet’s life. It won’t hurt. It’s only a mauvais quart d’heure.

I need the money to build a fence for my two ponies, Gaylight and Tuppence.

I did Dylan Thomas last year. And Sylvia Plath. I can’t remember where the money went.

Nobody ever listens to the programme anyway. I’ve never met anyone who actually listens to the thing.

Perhaps by mistake in a shearing shed out the back of Bourke or in the empty kitchen of a Paddington terrace, half heard.

But I’m writing about you as if you were a poet. Someone who has been done and can never be done again.

Like James K. But repeated. For half the original fee. God bless you and keep you. I love you. I know you love me.

/ 9 Riemke Ensing

‘ F A N C I F U L , A P O C R Y P H A L , D E L E T E ’1

(for Janet Wilson)

In this biographical story2 , the date is set at ’69, a Sunday in August and a late night hoolie at Tuwhare’s place. Plenty of kai and even the pungent mutton-birds, but the booze fast running out. While Davin is leaving, Brasch is coming up the stairs,

‘carrying a keg of beer.’

Nothing here about greetings, passing the time of Landfall, a catching of old friends, just this incongruous image – our gaunt, emaciated Hercules, worn thin to the point of pain, already labouringly under the weight of art,

‘carrying a keg of beer’?

‘Yeah, right! Tui.’

1 ‘DMD: colleague and friend’, David Mitchell, in Intimate Stranger – Reminiscences of Dan Davin, edited by Janet Wilson, Steele Roberts, 2000, p.138. A marking Dan Davin is said to have used as editor of OUP. 2 A Fighting Withdrawal – The Life of Dan Davin, Keith Ovenden, OUP, 1996, p. 344.

10 / Anne French

A P P R O A C H E S T O A U C K L A N D

Coming on watch somewhere south of the Knights, the world is black on black, a scatter of small lights showing our habitations. The moon slides down in the west, reddens, and disappears into a raft of cloud. We move steadily south in a warm breeze off the land.

Taranga slips away behind; Sail Rock is a black fist picked out in starlight. Steering on the steady flash from Cape Rodney as the Gulf opens up: Little Barrier, black on black, distant Moehau the edge of the known world. Stealing up on Auckland by night is a matter of lights.

By day, it’s making the boat go faster. The breeze fills in, the boat heels, the tell-tales stream, and we’re checking the speed. Seven knots, seven-five; trimming and tuning; Tiri Passage draws us in, and we’ve a bone in our teeth.

Kawau’s just a blue line on the horizon. Rakino Passage takes us, the tide is with us, the breeze freshens over Motutapu. There’s a yacht anchored in Station Bay, but we’ve no time for that now, we’re lined up on Motuihe. A sprint across the gap, and it’s coming aft for us nicely.

Boats fishing off Kowhatu Reef, the car ferry setting out from Putiki Bay, and we’re heading for home. It’s a pity to drop the sails, a damn shame to fire up the donkey, but we’ve no choice, there’s a calm berth waiting, and a hot shower, and a cold cold beer on the lawn.

/ 11 Will Leadbeater

A P O E T R Y M A N U A L

Poetry is not: word painting, a sound composition, philosophy or psychology –

anymore than it is a history of the heart, or a religion to live your life by –

it is none of these separately –

and yet it is all of them –

and much more besides.

12 / Michael Morrissey

M U C H A D O A B O U T R E F L E C T I O N

we make too much of moonlight yet it’s worth reflecting

on a gaunt lunacy while lolling in its white-painted nocturne

perhaps senor (or senorita) can grow a lean moustache as it waxes

or pull apart its pasty geographies while mumbling of water

on the cold red deserts of Mars lifelessly promising

a lichen or two – if lean red men walked its slopes

we would cry a dry lament for sandy cousins

who never knew the blaze of oxygen the softness of a lake

who never saw a rose cough blood nor bird needle a nest

/ 13 T I C K T O C K

tomorrow is the beginning of time so I’ve flushed away watches and chimes

the moon has its own pale agenda appearing like a clock without hands

the sun is a changeless explosion inhuman the sea timeless

until it runs out of salt I have checked out my face

and its chiming the years so I guess I’m stuck with it

and it’s always four o’clock in the afternoon when I glance

in the mirror so I’m eating up time’s dry biscuit before it parches

I’ve plucked a nasturtium orange as we have no need to report a simile

everything that chimes is giving me a mother of a headache

Panadol extra should do the trick but I’m allergic to the chemistry

time’s antibiotic can cure the dreariness of eternity

and it’s been a while since a bus came my way

14 / Alistair Paterson

A S O N G F O R C E L I A

From this high Pacific hill, my love let me show you the world, how our separate journeys were begun and where such journeys end: see, there the off-shore islands ride and further off, invisible those seething man-swept continents which constitute ourselves caught and pressed, quickly swayed by the smallest wind, the slightest rain so that no matter if we walk or run we are overcome by change.

Turn to me, let me touch your face, each of us see what the other sees: what traps and troubles wait, where to go and how to reach that place.

/ 15 S A F E L Y P E R H A P S , T H E A L A M O

Movies remind me that in America there always seems a lot to worry about – legitimate & not so legitimate dangers

that when you reach it the Rio Grande is merely centimetres, no more than ankle deep, a wide river running over sand –

which is as I remember it, how it looked when the posse arrived there & splashed across with their horses rearing up

riders spurring them on, mountains reaching up to a cloudless sky suggesting a hot & difficult ride to get to where

they were going, catch up with whoever it was they were chasing across the border into Mexico & predictable danger.

A flurry of jack rabbits huddles together ears laid back, watches nervously from below the mesa for the horsemen to pass.

The messages sent back were delayed, lie unread on a dusty shelf in a post office waiting to be taken to Albuquerque...

A train in the Hollywood theatre rushes past emitting smoke, scattering dust & pebbles – hurtles towards oblivion.

16 / H O W T O W R I T E F I C T I O N

James Wood has written a book (strangely) on how to write fiction – with exemplars: Amis, Austen, Camus, Dickens, De Quincey, Hawthorne, Lawrence, Lessing & the rest of them.

The girl in the library sits & waits for what comes to her from the book she’s reading, from life – from fiction, what’s to be written, what she’ll write in her essay on the page in front of her.

And the way James Wood puts it suggests it’s a beginning, (the assignment she’s writing) is imaginary like everything else that’s of course & in its own way as always, fiction... but of the best kind, a masquerade as James Wood describes it, written with plainly ‘the best of intentions’, to help transcribe what’s happening in the present & might lead her to the future.

And that’s what it is – fiction – her pausing, stopping to make notes thinking of weekends spent at the beach or travelling to somewhere she’s never been – will never visit...

/ 17 James Wood tells her how it’s done, what she should be doing & she knows if she stops taking notes, reading, working doesn’t finish his book, nothing will get written at all.

A C A L L I N G

(for Ruth Dallas)

Ah yes, you were surely the strange one alone on an empty beach where ‘the rocks leaned out towards the sea’

& there was ‘no cry of child or gull’ except your voice across the flung spray, the blown spume the rain-wet sand...

Ah yes, you were the strange one a primal discoverer of the smell of apples, wet grass, autumn leaves

18 / & now while the clouds bring gentle rain I summon you back – to walk as you say among ‘men with tall bones’.

Ah yes, you’re here with one of your books open at a page offering ‘waves on stone’, weeds that move ‘like floating hair’...

& there’s nothing more that needs to be said of shimmering stars or winter skies – of what they & the moonlight share.

/ 19 D I S C O V E R Y

(Rocks Road, Nelson, 2010)

You stand on the roadway looking at the sea at the rock – Fifeshire – at Haulashore, the island

in the roadstead opened by the first ships Lord Auckland, Arrow Will Watch, Whitby...

There’s something about it about the rock, the way it juts from the sea blocks out the beach

& gives voice to all that’s happened here – the long engagement of wind & water, tidal flow

the sad, slow grip & grind of river, rock & stone the ghosts of Patagonia Godwanaland...

20 / Mark Pirie

T H E V I E W

(For Alistair Paterson)

From the window, past the plane wing, the view of land, sea, sky, is much what you’d expect, and I don’t mean the usual ‘doll house’ or ‘toy model’ comparisons.

Below, the vast blue of ocean and green of land form while above clouds glide, and you realise this might be what separates you between oblivion and what often makes no sense: the earth.

A tiny spec darts across the blue – a small boat going about its business – that has some sense of its own, is probably there each week fishing, just off shore, hauling in its latest catch. Is it the same with poetry? It seems, as you say, a poem’s ‘medium’ can be the ‘message’, yet they’re always there waiting to be caught by those travelling that vast blue.

/ 21 Vivienne Plumb

T H E A N I M A L S

She said I am Japanese I am Reiko I try to find a house to live.

At the railway overpass at dusk a woman stood crying. I am trying to catch my breath, she claimed.

The lovers on the freezing park bench had no place to go so they held themselves tight until the light disappeared.

Behind a monstrous waste bin a man was downing a bottle of vodka. The stones in his shoes were hurting.

Fucking Palangi bitches she screamed inside the women’s toilets. And we all heard.

Reiko came back. She hadn’t found a thing, not a thing, nor even a cardboard box. The mother had her child on a leash, like a dancing bear in a harness. Here are the animals living on the outermost corner of their hearts. I am Reiko. I try to find a house to live.

22 / Ron Riddell

A N E M P T Y H O U S E I N T I T I R A N G I

(for my parents)

Empty rooms admit the light – at the windows leaves abide curious, alert, intent.

The people have passed on leaving faint, whispered echoes in the gently swaying air.

The people have passed on but not the ferns, flowers: magnolia, bougainvillea, manuka.

The people have passed on but not the shrubbery, trees: kauri, rimu, golden elm.

From the driveway entrance through the canopy of leaves the western sun peeps in

his lustrous fingers drawing back the curtains, populating the house once more.

/ 23 Jack Ross

O N E M O R E T H I N G [after Virgil & James Fenton]

– for Alistair Paterson –

Una in praecelsâ consedit rupe Celæno, Infelix vates, rupitque hanc pectore vocem. – Aeneid, iii: 245-6. [Calæno alone took her seat on the brow of a high rock, a prophetess of plagues, & from her heaving breast burst forth these words:]

H.O.D.: We need to add semester, mode & web status

Fred & Helen were going to split up

SECRETARY: I can’t add semester, mode or web-status as I don’t know what they are

Fred had some local colour to check out

LECTURER: Sorry – Is there something wrong with my email? I replied the moment I received your request, to this effect

After that – straight back to work You look troubled

24 / TUTOR: Oh, it’s web-enhanced all right I set up a website for the first run-through & am now building another as to mode of teaching, I’m agnostic

said Helen Wasn’t the trip good? Oh, the trip was good

H.O.D.: I have a problem with this course being offered internally I think the only way to attract sufficient students is through a block-course. I’m puzzled

said Fred When you’ve got something

LECTURER: We canvassed this extensively last year We’re anxious to retain one paper in internal mode & have had a most enthusiastic response from students

to think about that’s good I’d just like one more thing

LECTURER: So if you’ve got no objection (being “agnostic”) I’d like to report that we’ve decided to offer the paper internally next year

/ 25 What sort of thing? asked Helen That’s it

LECTURER: No reply to my email which I guess means that what you meant by “agnostic” is that you were happy to change the mode

I don’t know One more thing to round it

LECTURER: If the class includes international students this is a compellingly better mode for them.

off

LECTURER: Let me know

26 / Iain Sharp

T H E B R I E F E S T B E A T L E

Early Wednesday morning Ringo collapses, the furnaces of hell spilled in his throat, and George, always the most loyal and least oily, says scrap the sodding tour, but what about the Danish, Dutch, Hong Kong Chinese and Australasian fans and contracts and all that lovely lolly? So Epstein jumps on the blower pronto and by lunchtime drinks he’s found a well-built boy (far better blessed than Ringo, truth tell, but without the Scouse insouciance, spark and endearing nose), who once jockeyed his sticks for Tommy Steele’s obscure wee brother Colin but now sits with eager countenance and kit astern a nowhere jazz ensemble called, alas, the Shubdubs, and before tea Jimmy’s signed, realigned, redesigned, redressed, rehearsed enough to pacify the screaming teens who hear only their own delirium in any case. Still, Jimmy Nicol wants to do an honest job, God bless him, and he drums like Thor’s avenging thunder, yet his Pierre Cardin suit seems somehow stiff, his hair at front is not quite right in length, he’s not sure if he’s permitted to wave at airport fans along with Paul and George, or puff big bored smoke-rings, as they do, when they meet the press, and he just stinks at repartee,

/ 27 and becomes silent after Scotch and Coke and amphetamines all night on the plane, whereas clever John crawls on hands and knees straight from the red light district to the next

conference and, when asked what he expects to find in Australia, instantly quips “Australians” and grins like charming Lord Muck and manages amazingly to look serene and pleased and even half-alert during the boat trip along the Herrengracht, while Jimmy just appears seasick and dazed, particularly when he glances up

beneath a bridge and hyperventilating Dutch girls dangle a big banner that says Ringo Get Well Quick, and within a week, alas, Ringo does, and Jimmy must resume his rear position in the Shubdubs and give back his flash suit and recomb his hair, and within twelve months all his money’s gone and, sure, it’s easy to deride his whole

post-sixty-four career – the shrinking gigs, failed button-making firm in Mexico, sad renovation work, last-pitch carpentry – but what the fuck have we done with our lives? Our tuts and sneers can’t touch him. He recalls the bright lights in the Blokker Auction Hall and behind those borrowed drums a moment when he knew what it was like to be a god.

28 / W H Y I L O V E J A Z Z

(for John Fenton)

The same year that little girls in summer frocks in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, watched with idle curiosity their smartly attired daddies beat and hang homeless Rubin Stacy for his temerity in requesting food, his wretched face thereby startling their womenfolk, and the same year that

Franklin Delano Roosevelt declined to support an anti-lynching bill because he needed Klan families to vote for him, and the same year that Nazis denied hospital care, libraries, parks and beaches to those of semitic descent and introduced the notion of endgueltige Loesung,

/ 29 and the same year that Jewish market stalls blazed throughout Poland,

Benny Goodman, son of a Warsaw tailor who fled the pogroms,

Gene Krupa, Hollywood-handsome offspring of devout Polish Catholics,

and Teddy Wilson, black Texan Marxist and grandson of slaves,

met at a party in Forest Hills, New York and began jamming

and played Body and Soul – together – as if with one brain.

30 / Elizabeth Smither

R E A D I N G M A X I N E K U M I N

Please return by the latest date stamped below. I remember those old issue slips the clerkishness of them, the stamp hovering over its pad and then descending.

22 Dec 1992 (a Christmas reader) 14 Jan, 13 Nov 1993 (nearly a year between) 25 May 1998 (five years pass, a mid-year reprieve) and mine (unstamped) 3 June 2010.

Gone are the stamping librarians and the hush and reverence though it remains in the pages with their deckled edges, the cover in green, that features a barn poems about horses and bears and a sloth families, children, other poets and nuns and one titled ‘The Green Well’ in which a great pile-up of the spent and the dead creates the kind of compost poems come from. From deep pity. I think of the readers next in merit to the Christmas reader of 1992 of single poems, those who stood by a shelf with Maxine Kumin in their hands like skittery humming birds, testing and sipping content and satiated, without borrowing.

/ 31 Barry Southam

T H E M E D I C A L S U P E R I N T E N D E N T

A psychiatric hospital chief, he strode the corridors of his kingdom wearing shoes with built up heels the sight of which worried more than one patient able to figure the implications. Decades ago gave the nod for experiments on the captive serfs who came his way seeking sanctuary from a stone throwing world or demons within. Entertained zero doubts about his system of beliefs, tolerated no dissent from younger staff. The day of the nurse’s strike he arrived for work fully dressed in his old army officer’s uniform. Wondered why moves were made soon after to have him retire, was incensed at the suggestion he could then spend more time in his manicured garden, making the flowers stand to attention.

32 / T H E H O M E O W N E R

Slow moving, balding man measures his steps around his hilltop castle searching for things to do. Close by, glistening in the southern sun his car, washed and waxed, waits to return to the garage where some carpet lies ready should the internal combustion bowels disgrace themselves. Outside the pavement stones have been anointed with yet another coat of special paint a mere six months since their previous baptism. Finally he climbs the dividing hedge armed with electric cutters scalpel sharp to surgically trim nature’s determined growth. Returns to gather up a spirit level to aid his exactitude matching the bowling green lawn with its perfect angled borders. Tomorrow the hunt for any foolish weed that overnight might decide to seek morning warmth. In the wings the dark scythe silently waits, beyond mere mortals attempts at control.

/ 33 Essay Feature

A L I S T A I R P A T E R S O N B I R D S F L Y I N G

In a review of Alistair Paterson’s Birds Flying for Landfall 109, Kendrick Smithyman concluded, “Birds Flying has something of a unity of texture and singleness of voice which considerably helps to make this as a book probably more distinguished than any single poem. It is far from showy or exciting. It is, however, very satisfying, a very readable book.” 1 Time has both endorsed and refuted Smithyman’s considerations about Paterson’s second collection of verse. Satisfying and readable, the collection undoubtedly remains. Far from exciting? I humbly rebut the suggestion. Ditto Smithyman’s deliberation that the total sum of the book is perhaps more illustrious than its constituent parts. Birds Flying, for instance, contains a number of poems which not only withstand the test of poetic modish tastes and time but continue to be selected for inclusion in New Zealand poetry anthologies today. A case, then, of a collection whose fragments are as eminent as the whole. Instead, Smithyman’s observations about Birds Flying – “far from showy”, for instance – seem to perfectly summarize the author rather than the work. Paterson, after all, remains – as he was back in 1973 when Birds Flying was first printed – a reserved man. This sense of the subdued is most evident in his tireless editing of Poetry NZ, a job he has undertaken since 1992. New Zealand poets who have submitted their work to the magazine since Paterson began his editorship are familiar with the thorough, insightful and encouraging feedback he consistently offers, all in the name of promoting and perfecting New Zealand poetry. This reservation and tireless promotion of poetry not just in Aotearoa but overseas has also carried Paterson through nine poetry collections published during a span of over three decades, the inclusion of accounts of his work in The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature 2 and The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature 3, a work of literary criticism, The New Poetry 4, a novel, How to be a Millionaire by Next Wednesday 5, educational

34 / writings, plays, work as a President of the Auckland Branch of Pen, initiation and organisation of the American poet Robert Creeley’s 1976 tour of New Zealand, and a role as non- governmental delegate to the United Nations. That, as several commentators before me have observed, much of what Paterson has achieved is still to be fully appreciated by present readers seems to me a redolent and poignant symbol for the fate and merit accorded Birds Flying. A collection of thirty-three poems and the follow-up to the author’s first offering, Caves in the Hills 6, Birds Flying was a book that while it received favourable reviews at the time of its release, it is perhaps yet to receive its proper dues by our poetry critics and readers. A fuller evaluation of the merit of the collection is long overdue.

*

Birds Flying contains two poems – ‘Horses with Children’ and ‘Jenny Roache Love all the Boys in the World’ – which have been so widely anthologized they’ll no doubt be as familiar to contemporary readers as Janet Frame’s ‘Rain on the Roof’ and C K Stead’s ‘Pictures in a Gallery Undersea’. For Paterson, this is no mean feat. Today, leafing through the pages of Birds Flying and alighting upon both ‘Horses with Children’ and ‘Jenny Roache Love all the Boys in the World’, one can see how and why these poems have endured time, readership and poetic mores. Both have highly accessible, conversational and universal resonances to them. Take the opening of ‘Horses with Children’:

Horses with children by a green paddock stop the car. In a field of silence colder than stars, ears pricking the great beasts move gently through grass – the children follow wind-driven, like ungainly flowers

The sharp imagery; the consistent tone; the evocative atmosphere; the universality of message at the poem’s core: here are more

/ 35 reasons than enough to make ‘Horses with Children’ and ‘Jenny Roach Love all the Boys in the World’ stand out. In truth, though, as superlative as these poems are, the fact is that casting our eyes over the work in Birds Flying today tells us that there isn’t a weak poem here, and if two of the collection’s poems have been embraced so warmly and lastingly over the decades since by the country’s anthologists, publishers and readers, it’s quite obvious that any of the remainder deserves an equal footing in the minds and hearts of New Zealand editors and poetry enthusiasts. The opening poem, ‘An Amulet for Alexis’; the titular poem; ‘Clouds and Men’; the sequence verse, ‘What Never Happened’: here are poems which stand the test of time and look as contemporary to readers now as they must have looked to readers back in 1973. Often, the poetic facets of these works which make them feel like they might have been written yesterday, let alone nearly 40 years ago, are structure, language and stunning imagery. Note the opening of ‘Clouds and Men’, for example:

Moving over the hill towards Takaka with its fat land, rivers, sheltered sea, I had a premonition of disaster, some strange sense of an unease that descends with the clouds and the mist into those shallow pockets of lime outcrops and of dead trees

The astuteness of these lines arise not just from the visual pictures they create but from the atmosphere which Paterson subliminally imbues his words and illustrations with. The opening is as much filmic as poetic, the beginning of a short movie. It’s this which makes the poem – and others in Birds Flying – so present-day, for it’s the sort of poem which our best poets are presently writing and our readers are presently reading. Beyond this, the other notable thing about Birds Flying as a representation of its author, his style, his poetic reasoning and his literary worth lies in the latter part of the collection. Here Birds 36 / Flying offers a slight but noticeable shift in form which, with the benefit of hindsight, anticipates collections thereafter, most notably Qu’Appelle 7, Odysseus Rex 8 and recent offerings such as Summer on the Côte d’Azur 9 and Africa, //Kabbo, Mantis and the Porcupine’s Daughter 10. The shift occurs in the liminal space between pages 48 and 49 in Birds Flying. On page 48, we have a sombre, filmic poem, ‘Night Train to Urbiton’, which in a tight visually and metrically consistent five stanza form ruminates upon war, marriage and religion:

What are we talking about? Two tables away the young schoolmaster looks at his bride whose eyes are hugely black; we all move at the same pace invisibly from yesterday along tomorrow’s track. Somewhere outside

the conversational trap, the void sweeps down

For Paterson and Birds Flying, the symbolic void at the heart of this poem spills over the page, mutating and widening into a stylistic cavity which is used to prize open the aesthetic layout of a poem on the page and the negotiation words have with white space. What results is a new way of looking at and representing form for New Zealand poetry. And what follows – on page 49 onwards – are poems like ‘Letter to Miss Dickinson’, ‘Journey Towards Christmas’ and the penultimate piece, the wonderfully figuratively titled, ‘On Consideration of the Metaphysical Predicament’ which display both a movement, a poetic fissure in the poet’s work which will be a cornerstone of much that he will write from then on, and of a poetic consciousness informed by semiotics which will broadly enlighten New Zealand verse thereafter. Here, for instance, are the opening lines of ‘Letter to Miss Dickinson’:

Dear Emily you say / 37 exultation is the going that you know the way by mountain and plain from your father’s house out from the inland down to the shining sea.

And, the beginning of ‘On Consideration of the Metaphysical Predicament’:

What to do with the world or if one can’t do anything with it what to do about it: sometimes it’s good to imagine the ice is melting

Melting indeed. Thawing, dissolving: this work articulates and examines poetic and scientific reasoning and speculation connected with being, cause and identity, scrutinizing the dissolution of traditional ways of viewing the world in favour of progressive ideas. But the metaphysical quandaries advanced are also literary and structural, the poem liquefying established lyrical practices while, contrapuntally, solidifying (what were, back in 1973) emergent views of poetry concerned with linguistic, metaphorical and compositional parts of the art. These innovations hallmark Paterson’s following collections. By 1986, when Paterson’s Odysseus Rex was released, the author’s engagement with and examination of semiotics, and the fluidity of structure and speech were in full flourish, as the opening lines reveal:

38 / The black ships with their bright shields are gone the warriors & their sword bearers have fallen into the sea – into the sunless hollows of the earth

*

For New Zealand Poetry, the world changed somewhere between pages 48 and 49 of Birds Flying. We have yet to truly acknowledge, explore and explain that shift, just as we have yet to fully recognize, appraise and account for the poetic importance of its author.

Siobhan Harvey

Notes 1 ‘Review of Birds Flying’, Kendrick Smithyman, Landfall 109, The Caxton Press: Christchurch, March 1974, pp. 79 -85. 2The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (eds.), Oxford University Press: Auckland, 1998. 3The Penguin History of New Zealand Literature, Patrick Evans (ed.), Penguin: Auckland, 1990. 4The New Poetry, Alistair Paterson, Pilgrims South Press: Dunedin, 1981. 5How to be a Millionaire by Next Wednesday, Alistair Paterson, David Ling: Auckland, 1994. 6Caves in the Hills, Alistair Paterson, Pegasus Press: Christchurch, 1965. 7Qu’Appelle, Alistair Paterson, Pilgrims South Press: Dunedin, 1982. 8Odysseus Rex, Alistair Paterson, Auckland University Press: Auckland, 1986. 9Summer on the Côte d’Azur, Alistair Paterson, HeadworX : Wellington, 2003. 10Africa, //Kabbo, Mantis and the Porcupine’s Daughter, Alistair Paterson, Puriri Press: Auckland, 2008.

/ 39 Notes on Contributors

RAEWYN ALEXANDER is an Auckland poet and novelist. Her most recent book is A Bee Lover’s Poetry Companion (ESAW, 2010). OWEN BULLOCK has published a collection of haiku, wild camomile (Post Pressed, 2009) and a novella, A Cornish Story (Palores, 2010). JENNIFER COMPTON (born in Wellington in 1949) is now based in Melbourne. Her new book of poetry, Barefoot, is just out from Picaro Press. RIEMKE ENSING latest volume, O Lucky Man – Poems for Charles Brasch with images by Inge Doesburg, was handset/printed by Tara McLeod to further celebrate the 100th anniversary of Charles Brasch’s birthday. ANNE FRENCH is a keen sailor, racing weekly at Port Nick and crewing regularly on a Beneteau First 51 out of Westhaven for offshore and ocean races. She did a day sail on Alistair’s Cav 32 about 20 years ago – and he kindly taught her 6 year old son how to helm wing-and-wing. SIOBHAN HARVEYis the editor of Words Chosen Carefully: New Zealand Writers in Discussion (Cape Catley, 2010) and Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand Poems about Animals (Godwit, 2009). WILL LEADBEATER is an Auckland poet. MICHAEL MORRISSEY is an Auckland writer and reviewer. ALISTAIR PATERSON (ONZM) is an editor, novelist, critic and poet. For nearly 30 years he has edited literary magazines (Mate/Climate and Poetry NZ ) and encouraged numerous NZ and overseas writers. MARK PIRIE is a Wellington poet, publisher and critic. His new book is A Tingling Catch: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864-2009. VIVIENNE PLUMB writes poetry, fiction and drama, her new collection of poetry, crumple, will be launched in November 2010 by Seraph Press. RON RIDDELL is a poet and novelist who divides his time between New Zealand and Colombia. Visit his website at: www.ronriddell.com JACK ROSS’s latest collection of short stories is Kingdom of Alt . You can find details of his previous books and publications at his blog The Imaginary Museum [http://mairangibay.blogspot.com/]. IAIN SHARP (b. 1953) is an Auckland librarian and journalist. Like many New Zealand writers, he received early support and encouragement from Alistair Paterson, who awarded him first prize in a poetry competition in 1975. ELIZABETH SMITHER’s most recent collection of poems is The Year of Adverbs, AUP 2007. She received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2008. BARRY SOUTHAM is a Christchurch poet and poetry editor of Presto.

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