Nicholas Reid
Cranial Bunker by Stephen Oliver (Greywacke Press, Canberra, 2023), 130pp, $29.99
In his latest volume, Cranial Bunker, Stephen Oliver says, ‘I am old enough now to talk with ghosts.’ Now in his early seventies, he finds himself living in ‘Siren City’, in the back blocks of New Zealand, a modernist wasteland of crime and ‘the psychiatrically displaced’, reflecting on a life and a career marked by what might have been. He writes in a voice that is often quietly personal, contemplating age, death, the fate of poets and ancient love affairs. He also writes in the idiom of late modernism. His poems (and prose poems), never merely confessional, are intensely inventive in language and image. This is one of those rare volumes where, for me, poem after poem hits the right note; it’s the late work of a master of his craft.
A number of poems explore Oliver’s intuition that, in their deepest recesses, memory and folk memory merge. In his 2021 essay-memoir collection, Unposted, Autumn Leaves, he mythologises this idea through his ancestor Thomas McCormack, an Irish blacksmith in later nineteenth-century Dunedin, and connects further back to the bards and skalds of ancient Ireland. Whatever its truth or falsity, it’s an effective conceit—and if we were forced to reject it, we would also consign much in Yeats and Eliot to the dustbin of rejected theories. How might Wallace Stevens have been improved if someone had sat him down and explained how the perceptual imagination really works!
One example of this concern with memory appears in ‘The Migration’. The poem begins, in typical Oliver style, with an image:
Weighty, full moon hoisting over ridge lines
the flickering of torchlight, isolate, and forked lightning’s
flared clematis, but this spelt primeval memory.
These are perfectly phrased lines, diffident at first and becoming expansive in the words ‘and forked lightning’s / flared clematis’. If the moon is often a romantic image for the imagination, here it provides but a dim modernist light into our darker regions. As so often in Oliver, nature is busily in action, ‘hoisting’ itself unnaturally into consciousness. We are positioned in the Paleolithic period, on the cusp of a fall into awareness of life and death, a point where ‘the blurred images of our Neolithic selves materialized’. But for Oliver, these revelations are ‘with us still’, revelations of death and violence that continue to trouble ‘the collective mind’ and manifest as an expulsion from Eden. They lie at the core of a wider anxiety in Oliver’s writings, appearing through ‘rubble strewn memory’.
Indeed, memory and violence are announced in the opening poem, ‘Palimpsest’, a reflection on the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the latest in a long history of outrages. Time is not linear: it lingers and repeats, the city a ‘palimpsest of memory’. The speaker ‘arrives in Paris in 1902, as did Rilke’ and Hitler later: a city where Celan drowned himself in 1970, Gerard de Nerval committed suicide in 1855, and in 2015 terrorism shocked the world. In such a context, the poem’s modernism is bleak. The clouds ‘rise to vast, domed cupola upon / which you can project your own slide show’ while ‘the myriad blank canvases ranged / along the Left Bank’ wait to be painted, to ‘remake Paris over and over’.
Fortunately, Oliver can be amusing, writing wittily of a ‘rust belt town’, probably American but with New Zealand resonances, where ‘maybe the rapture had hit, / but this one orchestrated by neoliberalism’. Similarly, a number of his short, two-line epigrams (there are 260 of these, covering nineteen pages) are comic or sardonic, including those featuring a feminine alter ego, ‘Edith’:
As Edith plummeted down the lift well, she
was heard to yell, ‘A plague on hipsters’.
Likewise, we find the Old Testament parodied:
And then Noah said, ‘The Lord told me there
will be climate change’.
And:
Consider the lilies of the field, and then
regard the cowpats.
More equivocal is his account of the death of his brother, Michael, in ‘Shallow Creek’—a poem voiced with a studied detachment that some will feel verges on the sardonic. Michael slides:
feet first, into
a shallow creek, late at night, drunk.
Only not to wake up
the next morning, dead—hypothermia, reported
the coroner.
The poem presents us with a brother, like his father, ‘baptised in vodka’, prey to a ‘sinister, inner self’ and nurturing ‘dark hatreds, jealousies, melancholia’. But while this is quickly dismissed (‘I don’t think about him much these days’), some will wonder about possible parallels, given the examples of Celan and de Nerval mentioned above.
The volume also settles some old scores, perhaps indulging some of those ‘hatreds’ and ‘jealousies’ disavowed in ‘Shallow Creek’—scores against ‘hipsters’, ‘self-proclaimed critics’, and the products of university creative writing courses. The unnamed critic of ‘The Literalist’ emerges as a literary sociopath, one suffering from a ‘perceptual or developmental disability’. It would be best not to take such remarks personally, for they are mutatis mutandis, the views of many poets struggling in a world where readers are hard to find.
A number of the poems integrate the voice of others, effortlessly dialogical. ‘The Other Side’ describes a fallen tree on the banks of the Waikato River. The poem opens with a colloquial voice, its grammar bad: ‘Storm done it, wasn’t there last week’. We see the upended root system, but here, as usual, nature speaks in ‘tortured hieroglyphics’, its voice indecipherable—and the images are unnaturalistic, the roots ‘black as a launching pad after the lift off’, a product of a ‘failed launch’. The poem’s title raises an unanswered question, for we are never clear what is on ‘the other side’. Is it the other side of the storm, or of the tree’s catastrophic death, or of a belated and uncertain ‘act of remembrance’? This is the predicament of late modernism.
And this predicament extends to the self, for we live in a post-Humean world in which we can know the self only as subject, never as object. In a quiet interior monologue, ‘Grand Tour’, Oliver raises faces the unknowability of the self:
A conversation with the self is always an
engagement with ‘the other’, the undisclosed
identity.
We find ourselves on ‘a grand tour’, being led from ‘childhood’s enclosure’ by an ‘other’ ‘we cannot know’, ‘always ahead of us’, ‘always beyond reach’. And given these uncertainties of memory, self and nature, ‘Only small epiphanies remain, preserved within
the ossuary of peculiar silence, the other side of every elusive moment’—a line that comes from one of the many fine prose poems (of which there are twenty-five) in the collection.
So far, I have been describing what kind of poet Oliver is, locating him within the traditions of a late, high modernism. But I also want to convey what brings me back to Oliver time and time again: his perfect phrasing and his gift for image and observation. Consider, for instance, the opening lines in ‘Welcome Ghost’:
The curtained light through bird’s wings.
River takes the sky with it,
sun tight-rope walks a spider’s web.
These images flow with such rapidity that the casual reader might fail to stop and enter into them, and yet evanescence is at the heart of these Bergsonian moments of durée, drawing on our inner subjective experience of time. What other poet demands that you see the glow of curtained light through a bird’s wing, or the way a river moves light, or the spider’s web as a tight-rope, the glint of sun as fleeting and delicate as a moment of consciousness. In this poem, as in so many others, Oliver is an imagist, demanding we give our attention to rendering the tightly recorded minutiae of perception, as Ezra Pound did in his poem ‘In a Station of the Metro’ when writing of ‘Petals on a wet, black bough’. And here, in Oliver, the emotion is in the image, an autumnal sense of ‘the gift that destroys’, the ‘welcome ghost’ of poetry.
Cranial Bunker is a tour de force from perhaps New Zealand’s most overlooked poet. It ranges from fine memorial commemorations of writers and friends who have died to sardonic reflections on the ‘hipster trendoids’ that Oliver despises. It contains Blakean ‘Epigrams for the Disenchanted’ and self-parody (‘Tent Flap’). It recalls time spent in the Cyclades, nearly fifty years ago, and love affairs and the literary scene on Hydra in those distant days. And it is a collection notable for the way in which Oliver has developed the prose poem into tightly wrought gems, prose made into poetry. It is consciously a late volume, meditating in part on death (‘What Lies Ahead’) and on plangent regret. It shows, finally, that while modernism may now be a period, it still has new things to reveal.
DR NICHOLAS REID is an independent scholar who lives in Canberra, Australia. He has written extensively on Schelling, post-Kantianism and the later thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Formerly, he was a senior lecturer at the University of Otago, where he taught nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry between 1990 and 2003. More recently he has taught English literature at the Australian National University.
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