Tony Beyer
Spindrift: New & selected poems by Bob Orr (Steele Roberts, 2023), 240pp, $40; Residual Gleam: Selected poems & translations by Roger Hickin (Cold Hub Press, 2023), 88pp, $28
Anyone who has taken an interest in New Zealand poetry during the last half-century or so is likely to have the voice of Bob Orr somewhere in the mind’s ear like a fluent soundtrack to a lifetime. From the 1970s onwards his lyrical images, expressed with elliptical terseness or rangy and colloquial eloquence, have been irreplaceable components of the scene. He is unique, too, in being acknowledged by fellow poets of all stripes and styles as the genuine article, both gifted and dedicated to his craft. Readers and listeners at readings who are not poets enjoy his work as well. With its epigraphic reference to Dylan Thomas, Spindrift is Orr’s first retrospective collection, an overview of 11 previous titles, concluding with a generous annexe of new or newly published poems. The tilt of the cap to Thomas is relevant because some of that raw, romantic abandon we associate with the doomed Welshman is native to Orr’s practice. Otherwise seemingly outdated concepts like inspiration, the muse, susceptibility to dreams and the ordinary magic of being abound in these poems.
For all their interplay with the numinous, however, Orr’s poems are direct, readily approachable and sturdily based in the world where we live. Their magic often concerns the appreciation and, indeed, celebration of existence, mundane details not excepted. A characteristic Orr trope is the transition between one state of consciousness and another via the intervention of a memory, object, character or association—even a name. Seaports, books, artworks, items of clothing or footwear, meals and details of the natural world all serve as vehicles for this process. Even a poem itself can do this, as in ‘South of Capricorn’, where we are given the precise location (Surrey Crescent), time of day (lunchtime—hence a sandwich), the company (‘a woman / of wide latitudes’) and a hint of the cosmic (‘sun / that will one day make ghosts out of all of us’), while the poem is being written with completely unselfconscious self-reference on the paper bag the sandwich came in. Such human vignettes bring his cities to life.
Orr’s working career as a mariner was largely confined to the Waitemata Harbour and Hauraki Gulf, and yet he writes of these with the same mythic energy Homer or, through him, Seferis gave to the Aegean and Mediterranean. One of the book’s most moving poems recounts the discovery of the latter’s verse, among others, by an adolescent farmer’s son in culturally dowdy Hamilton (‘Heliotropes’). This is biography transcended. Over his career, Orr has offered as many descriptions of the sea as Inuit have words for snow. For a boy from the dairy-farming inland, he has also managed to write some of the most beautiful poems we have about the mainly North Island coastal environment.
With the title poem and two others from his Kilmog Press book, When Muldoon was King, Orr demonstrates his skill as a satirist in the broadside mode. Elsewhere, his politics are subtler and more deeply thought through. It takes an acute sensibility to ironise the neon sign for BITTER BEER outside a Waikato tavern (‘At Taupiri’). In the opening stanzas of ‘Hawaiki’ he speaks for his own generation and for a wider society with regard to the resources available, used or unused:
My first
university
the freezing works
at Horotiu—
my first professor
a tohunga
in white overalls
and gumboots
who worked
on the boning floor.
Among the new poems, the superb ‘A whaleboat at Kororāreka’ develops this concept by telling us: ‘I look out across the bay to the Treaty Ground—/ its anchor stone preventing Aotearoa from being swept away’. Again, the exact image in the exact right place. It is interesting that in Orr’s notes to the poems almost every Pākehā or European reference—from Robert Muldoon to Rimbaud—is efficiently glossed, while the reader is assumed to be able to understand all but three or four of the book’s frequently occurring te reo words and names. I like the statement this makes.
A seasoned honesty emerges when poems are more directly related to personal encounters and experience. Few would doubt the sincerity of Orr’s elegies for his parents, hard-earned as much on account of their grief as through the necessary process for a poet of finding words to honour that grief: ‘Most gracious and unassuming mother / it has taken me ten years to write this elegy’ (‘Mum’). In some ways, the elegy continues to be written. Matters of the heart are also sources of mature and sometimes regretful reflection:
How many times and for what purpose
did we have to break
each other’s
hearts?
(‘A woman in red slacks’)
Poems of this kind are peopled with individuals Orr has known and identifies. The poetry scene of his youth and its leading figures recur in memory, curiously without nostalgia, as if their shared contemporaneity is part of an ongoing creative mix.
With some justification, the selection in Spindrift leans strongly towards Orr’s later work. This allows the reader enough of a glimpse of the younger poet’s potential to gauge how successfully it has been realised.
It’s a delight to see how the image—significant to Orr from the beginning—of watermelons, for example, is permutated and refreshed in several poems. Some of the later examples have a generous ease and humour, like the plainspoken haiku sequences ‘Buddha chopping firewood’ and ‘Buddha burning firewood’. Other newer poems rejoice in place and in requited adult love. Cumulatively, this is a book that feels dynamically alive. It is beautifully presented in a manner worthy of its contents, which contain the heart of our country by whatever name. Every tourist, hiker or young vagabond of any age should have a copy in their backpack.
Roger Hickin is a visual artist, poet, internationally respected translator, and publisher. All these faculties come together in the cover image, contents and imprint of Residual Gleam. Younger than Bob Orr by only two years, he shares similar poetic and cultural DNA. They belong to a generation who have, by and large, had to invent an artistic heritage for themselves. Both have established paths forward from Modernism by attentiveness to European and European-language exemplars, which have helped them to steer clear of the North American tendency towards dry experimentalism. In Hickin’s case, the challenge of translation, largely from Spanish, has whetted his acumen as a crafter of words.
Tough wisdom and clear intention are salient features of Hickin’s original poems. The opening piece, ‘Invercargill, 1950s’ introduces us to ‘a boy … / with a story sprouting in his head’. We are once again in the region of restrictive expectations and at the start of a journey towards knowledge. In a group of later poems set in the Jerusalem / Hiruhārama of Baxter’s era, there’s a liberating concentration on the natural allure of the place rather than ambient personalities. Paradoxically, Hickin’s scope expands in a series of travel poems, some of them minimal in texture, emerging initially from his own South Island landscapes.
Beginning with an effective touch of Baxter and an admonitory tone, ‘Crossing the Ebro’ recalls the betrayed and condemned soldiers fighting for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War. An equivalent level of appalled compassion accompanies Hickin’s description of an Italian cemetery where victims of an SS massacre are commemorated. The approach here resembles his practice as a visual artist, making use of materials to hand or, in his own words, ‘tacked-up scraps / of blood-red painted tin’ (‘A Postcard from Solentiname’). The aesthetic outlined here is elaborated in a fine poem on Giorgio Morandi, that architectonic landscapist of still-life bottles and jars. Ostensibly a travel item, the poem quoted above blends into a powerful elegy for Ralph Hotere, one of Hickin’s key associates and influences.
A subtext to this intriguing collection, ordained by its contents, is Hickin’s meditation on the autobiographical past, what to value and what to discard: ‘the minefield / of nostalgia’ (‘Survivors’). There is no doubt that translation has given Hickin a wider context to work in, where he can project comparisons with his origins and progress. The first of the poems chosen here, ‘Once’, from the Italian of Umberto Saba, hints endearingly towards Hickin’s own ‘Invercargill, 1950s’. In his introduction of other writers from Nicaragua, Chile, Spain and Mexico to a new audience, Hickin’s consistent and laudable intention has been to arrive at a viable living text in English. It would be good to have all his translations presented with the original language opposite the English versions, but that’s another project.
In a 2015 Jacket2 interview Vaughan Rapatahana undertook with small press poetry publishers from Aotearoa, Roger Hickin commented, ‘Along with Robert Graves all I’d ask for is the occasional poem that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. And perhaps a little less of everything else.’ Certainly, in Residual Gleam, he has achieved that aim.
TONY BEYER is a Taranaki-based writer. His poetry collection titles include Jesus Hobo (1971) and Friday Prayers (2019), with a fair number between. Recent work has appeared in Catalyst, Landfall, Mudlark, Otoliths, and Tarot.
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