Anxious Ancestry

Peter Simpson
Collected Poems,  by Peter Bland (Steele Roberts, 2012), 308pp, $45.

Peter Bland is nudging 80 and has been publishing poetry for well over half a century; nor is he finished yet, with a new book, Breath Dances (Steele Roberts), post-Collected, out late 2013. It is hardly surprising that hisCollected Poems is a substantial book, over 300 pages long and containing close to 300 individual poems, the vast majority of them (apart from sequences) less than a page in length – Bland was always and remains largely a poet of the short take. Even so, despite its scale, it is far from a ‘Complete’ poems. I haven’t done an exhaustive check but there’s nothing here from his first publication, Habitual Fevers – his portion of a book called Three Poets published by Capricorn Press in 1958; about half a dozen have been culled from Let’s Meet (2003), and of the 57 poems in Coming Ashore  (2011) only 31 are retained here. I have the impression there has been a winnowing from most of the 15 or so collections he has published.

Bland adopts a six-part, broadly chronological structure, namely:  New Zealand 1956-1967; England 1972-1984; New Zealand 1984-1990; On the Move 1990-2004; England 2004-2009; New Zealand 2009-2011 – an arrangement which foregrounds the habitual to-and-froing between New Zealand and England which has been not only the insistent pattern of Bland’s life but also the underlying structure of many of his poems and collections. As he wrote in ‘Just Passing Through…’ –

          Two countries
split me down the middle. One
where I  ‘came from’, and this
where I first learned to live. (p. 141)    

Plenty of New Zealand writers have undergone the experience of changing countries but nothing comparable to the complexity of Bland’s repeated and frequent oscillations, with at least three extensive periods spent in each country. It is hardly surprising that voyaging, emigration, return, identity, settlement, unsettlement and related tropes are the constant terms of his poetic journeyings.

Bland first came to New Zealand as a 20 year old in 1954 and settled in Wellington. He soon threw in his lot with the so-called ‘Wellington group’ whose leading figures, James K. Baxter, Louis Johnson and Alistair Campbell,  at one stage all worked for the same government department – the School Publications Branch of the Department of Education – where Bland eventually joined them,  as he recalls in the late poem ‘Where Were You in ’62?’:

I’m going to like it
here at School Pubs
with Jim in the clouds
and Lou Johnson in the basement
and Alistair Campbell
being followed around
by Te Rauparaha’s ghost…(p. 297)

Of this triumvirate it was the currently neglected Johnson who became Bland’s particular friend and poetic mentor.  There are no fewer than five poems dedicated to Johnson in this collection (only his wife, Beryl, gets more dedications). The first of these, ‘Three Poems from Plunket Street’ (p. 46) is in the mode of slightly manic suburban surrealism that Bland shared with Johnson in the fifties and sixties, though Bland’s work had an edgy comic extravagance that Johnson’s lacked. ‘Just Passing Through…’   alludes to a common preoccupation with existential states of being:

To share
your lifelong interest in
an inner alchemy, helped widen a vision
stunted by immigrant loneliness. (p. 139)

Johnson died in Europe in 1988 while holding the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship.  Bland’s ‘A Last Note from Menton’, at four pages one of his longer and most searching poems, ends:

You wrote that you ‘couldn’t will our history
to hide behind a settler’s fence.’
What a relief! All that anxious ancestry
now left to others. Your poems adrift
like paper boats or messages in bottles,
careless of landfall, happy to be themselves. (p. 187)

Phrases such as ‘anxious ancestry’ and ‘careless of landfall’ are loaded with the terminology of the literary battles of the sixties when Johnson, Baxter and Bland led the struggle to free local poetry from the preoccupation with New Zealand ancestry and identity especially associated with the editorial stance of Allen Curnow (Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse) and Charles Brasch (Landfall). In ‘A Meeting in Barcelona’ (p. 216) Bland describes an imaginary encounter (lively but not wholly convincing) with Johnson’s ghost , ‘visiting Picasso’s favourite brothel’, while ‘A Visit’, written twenty years after Johnson’s death, reiterates what the younger poet most admired in the older:

           You were
your own experiment,
laying yourself on the line,
listing daily failures
and dark joys of the heart. (p. 298)

I was once at a party in Christchurch in the sixties when there was a punch-up between two poets over the merits of Johnson’s poetry, a situation impossible to envisage these days, either about Johnson or anyone else for that matter. Bland’s loyalty to his old mentor in poems spread over four decades is a touching discovery of this book.

Although never a radical in terms of poetic technique, Bland nevertheless attended to a range of international voices, including Pablo Neruda, Joseph Brodsky, Christopher Middleton and various Americans including W.C. Williams, Howard Nemerov, Galway Kinnell, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell – all mentioned in his excellent memoir Sorry, I’m a stranger here myself (Vintage 2004 ) – and while these are mostly ‘palefaces’ rather than ‘redskins’ (to refer to a famous distinction made by Robert Lowell – the redskins were the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and New Yorkers like Frank O’Hara) – they nevertheless helped him to free his verse from the straitjacket of regular stanzas and metrics.  This is apparent in the last two poems of the first section, ‘Lines on Leaving the Last Reservation’ and ‘My Side of the Story’, which are exceptional for their wit, colloquial vigour, zany energy and sense of the dramatic:

The children are growing up!
Good God,
half our lives already gone
in learning what?
that ends don’t meet
– except in bed –
and occasionally
(being cramped for space)
on top of the kitchen sink. (p. 62)

In the poems written during Bland’s first return to England (1972-1984 – there is an unexplained gap between 1968-1971 when evidently no poems were written) where he made a living on the London stage and often wrote for London Magazine, there is a notable broadening of subject as he responds to a more populous, heterogeneous and complex scene than New Zealand suburbia. A few randomly selected titles will indicate something of his range of topics: ‘Paranoia in Piccadilly Circus’, ‘River talk – Putney’, ‘Here comes that childhood pond again…’, ‘Comic book heroes’ ,‘Incident in a Soho sex shop’, ‘Corridors of power’, ‘Lament for a lost generation’, ‘The fatherman and the motherwoman’.

An unexpected new direction which proved surprisingly fertile was into art history, most notably in the sequence ‘Just looking’ which offers deft portraits of Bonnard, Henri Rousseau, Claude Lorraine, Tiepolo, Rembrandt and Daumier. The poems are invariably unpretentious, amusing and insightful, as in the end of ‘Viewing Primitives’:

As witness one scene where Rousseau picks up
some solitary leaves. These
tempt him to visit the botanical gardens
where jungles are suddenly commonplace
and where his neighbour’s unattainable nude wife
can be safely arranged on a studio couch
among artistic tigers and edible flowers. (p. 93)

Another successful extension of Bland’s range in these years was through the dramatic monologue, first adopted in several ‘Mr Maui’ poems written in New Zealand such as ‘Mr Maui at home with the Death Goddess’.  Particularly compelling is the five-part, ‘The Crusoe factor’, which exploits Bland’s talent for sharp-edged portraits, colloquial idiom (honed in the theatre) and for a kind of mythic expansion of his own circumstances. Here, for instance, is the end of ‘Crusoe’s farewell’, which prefigures Bland’s own return to his ‘island home’:

Far beyond the fat Spice Isles
and distant colonies of gold and blood
we’ll come again to that island home
that so mysteriously has chosen us. (p. 132)

The widening range and increasing maturity evident in the English poems of the seventies and eighties were sustained during Bland’s second sojourn in New Zealand from 1984-90. The interest in the visual arts continues with poems about McCahon, Van der Velden, and Gauguin in Auckland. The fourteenth century (Yuan/Ming period) Chinese painter Ni Tsan turns up (‘From A Hermit’s Notebook’) as one of Bland’s most frequently adopted masks:

                                                 I’m
alone, as they say, but not lonely, knowing
that this dark tide slowly drifting out
(with the new moon stranded, but only for a moment,
like a yellow boat on banks of grey cloud)
is my own life quietly going nowhere,
its days deserted of bright ideas… (p. 170)

An unexpected development, given Bland’s former hostility to earlier poets’ preoccupation with settler history, is an expanded interest in  nineteenth century colonial themes, as in the powerful ‘Beginnings: Guthrie Smith in New Zealand, 1885’, in which he assumes the voice of the author of Tutira:

Who am I? What am I doing here
alone with 3000 sheep? I’m
turning their bones into grass. Later
I’ll turn grass back into sheep… (p. 135)

Guthrie-Smith turns up again (though unnamed) in ‘Letters Home – New Zealand 1885’, a poem in 7 parts, originally dedicated to Allen Curnow (though this has since been dropped), as if in implicit acknowledgment that he now shares concerns with former antagonists:

My mind’s escaped old ways of seeing,
strict categories of breeding, station, class;
it roams, almost unprincipled, between
these tremendous horizons
and the new small print
used in Bibles that you’ve sent…(p. 179)

The most impressive of Bland’s personae (the Poundian term seems appropriate), however, is Maui, first appropriated from Maori mythology in the sixties. Sixteen later ‘Mr Maui’ poems are included in Collected Poems. The Maui persona inspires Bland to write with unprecedented verve and colloquial force, as in ‘Mr Maui at Buckingham Palace’:

                                                     You’ll
notice I’m wearing my ‘Pommy Bastard’ T-shirt
and thumping stray bobbies with the jawbone club
I tore from an old whore’s mouth. Lately
I’ve developed a sense of history…
this visit purges my colonial past.
Soon I’ll be looking for a girl to crawl into. (p. 190)

In the section called On the Move: 1990-2004, Bland temporarily abandons the familiar back and forth between New Zealand and the UK which defines  his habitual modus operandi to explore other places and less localised concerns. There are poems set in Italy, France, Spain, Greece, Bosnia and in several states of Western USA – California, Arizona, Nevada. Exile, pilgrimage, voyagers and voyaging, journeys and journeying, travellers and travelling, departure, moving house, moving on, passing through, nomads, drifters – these terms and tropes recur again and again, as in the final stanza of ‘Port of Call’, another poem ‘after Ni Tsan’:

I’ll leave none the wiser, stepping aboard
the same blunt boat that brought me in,
knowing no one, learning to belong
so slowly, over a lifetime, barely
getting the hang of it before its time to move on. (p. 208)

The fifth section, England 2004-2009, reprises by now familiar themes, as suggested by representative titles: ‘The palaces of childhood’, ‘The old place’, ‘The way back’, ‘Parental ghosts’, The deserted boatyard,’ ‘Staring time in the face’. With increasing age, Bland’s focus on the distant past, his ‘fatherman and motherman’, his war-time childhood and school-days, become ever more insistent. ‘Something of an apology’, one of many addressed to his wife Beryl, captures a pervasive mood:

                                     Beguiled
by notions of time and place
I acquired a thwarted sense of belonging
and passed this on to those I love.
(Not a drab inheritance but one
frayed with panic.) Forgive
the restlessness I landed you with,
the worn-out shoes, the childhood baggage,
the lonely campfires, the ruined follies. (p. 255)

The last section, New Zealand 2009-11, is dominated by poems expressing grief at the loss of his wife Beryl whom he calls ‘the Madonna of the open road’.  No doubt the writing was a cathartic process for the author. And for the reader? Well, I for one found the poems brave and moving. They are not mawkish or sentimental, as the opening lines of the first poem in ‘Loss’, a sequence of 23 numbered sections, suggest:

I was telling you off
when you died. You’d tried
to get out of bed,
then fell… (p. 265)

Other recent poems revisit many of the themes that run through all of Bland’s work: childhood, exile, the heady days of Wellington in the sixties. If anything is new it is the sense that Bland is edging towards a more spiritual apprehension of the world, as in the plangent last lines of ‘Remote’:

                                                     It was then
we began to know who we were
and what we were part of and why we’d come
so far from our lives to find what we’d lost. (p.283)

Bland’s Collected Poems is a rich collection, seldom ground-breaking but consistently absorbing and enjoyable to read, and well deserving of the recognition accorded him in the Prime Minister’s Awards for 2011. He is surely one of the more egregious omissions from the Williams/Stafford Anthology of New Zealand Literature.

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PETER SIMPSON was awarded the 2012 Michael King Creative New Zealand Fellowship to write a book on the arts in Christchurch 1933-53, working title: Bloomsbury South. He is Director of The Holloway Press in the University of Auckland. His most recent book is Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann (AUP, 2011).