Peter Simpson
Departures by Dunstan Ward (Cold Hub Press, 2024), 104pp, $28; Slow Fires: New Poems by Leonard Lambert (Cold Hub Press, 2024), 42pp, $19.50; The Glass Guitar by Peter Olds (Cold Hub Press, 2023), 72pp, $26
In an autobiographical moment in his poem ‘A Radiant Certitude’, addressed to poet and fellow Robert Graves scholar Ann Munic, Dunstan Ward writes:
She published a poem of mine in her journal
(we almost quarrelled about the French text).
It unlocked a door. I was nearing seventy;
In four years my first collection appeared.
That first collection was Beyond Puketapu (Steele Roberts, 2015). Since then Ward, in a remarkable late efflorescence (like Katherine Mansfield’s aloe, perhaps), has published two further books, both with Cold Hub Press: At This Distance (2019) and now Departures, his third, largest and most substantial collection. Born in Dunedin in 1942 and a graduate of the University of Canterbury, Ward taught briefly at Waikato University before leaving New Zealand in 1971. After a sojourn in London, he settled permanently in Paris in 1973, where he became a Professor of English at the University of London Institute until his retirement in 2007. He is a leading authority on the poetry of Graves, editing with Graves’ widow Beryl, the Complete Poems in three volumes (Carcanet, 1995, 1997, 1999), also published as a single volume by Penguin in 2015.
He still lives in Paris, a city which figures prominently in this latest as in his other volumes. For example, the present book includes poems about the disastrous fire at Notre Dame (‘Burning the Cathedral’), about the devastating impact of Covid on the city (‘Infected Spring’, ‘Confinement’), on walking daily beside the Seine (‘Cormorant’, ‘Beside the River’), on the Jardin du Luxembourg (‘The Garden at Night’), and, perhaps most memorably, ‘In this Street’, which evokes many of the celebrated artists, writers and composers (helpful explanatory notes are provided) who have likewise lived on the rue des Grands Augustins, on the Left Bank a few steps from the Seine. They include Boris Vian, Apollinaire, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Baudelaire, Balzac, Picasso, La Bruyère, Gounod, and Charles Meryon. Some of Charles Meryon’s original etchings of Paris were weirdly superimposed by scenes of Māori life in Akaroa, which he visited as a French naval officer in the 1840s, thus (as in the poem) linking past and present, here and there, in an oblique but satisfying manner. This poem is no name-dropping exercise but a meditation on a city the poet has been part of for over fifty years.
Yet there is much more to Departures than poetic evocations of the city of light. The book takes its title from an eight-page opening sequence, which tells the story, through vivid fragments, of the writer’s family history and their involvement in New Zealand over several generations. A cluster of Wards and Redwoods, linked by marriage, emigrated to Nelson on the George Fyfe in 1842 as part of E.G. Wakefield’s grandiose settlement scheme. Some prospered in the colony, in various parts of the South Island—Nelson, Marlborough, Otago—others less so; still others joined the Roman Church (one becoming an Archbishop). It is a colonial narrative familiar in its profile but unique in its particulars of success and hardship (shipboard deaths, estates acquired and lost, drought and disease, injury and death in war) that sometimes intersects with important historical events, such as a surveyor’s encounter with Māori hostility on the Wairau Plains and the subsequent conflagration:
While Joseph’s making a dog kennel, his cousin
Betsey rushes over, ‘the picture of alarm’,
To tell him about the ‘horrible massacre’,
Followed by his aunt, ‘waving her hands and crying’…
Throughout the sequence, Ward’s tone is carefully dispassionate, largely allowing quoted family documents to speak for themselves, and resonate widely. Nowhere is this more compelling than in fragments from the diary of a private soldier—an uncle of the writer—whose last entry ends mid-sentence on the day of his death in the trenches of northern France in 1916: ‘There was a full moon, / & I could see the dead in all directions. / There is a very heavy—.’ The sequence itself ends equally impressively:
When finally my father decides to sell
the farm, where he is living alone, his wife
and six of his children having departed
to England, he carries from the derelict barn
all the rat-and sparrow-infested stacks
of Ward and Redwood letters, diaries, photos,
tips them into the dry water race that he dug
one desperate summer, and then he fills it in.
In a way, the poem sequence ‘Departures’, with a title of multiple connotations, is a kind of disinterment of family history, a ‘filling in’ in a quite other sense.
Following ‘Departures’, a group of smaller poems reflects on aspects of the family’s more recent history, focusing in particular on the poet’s own memories: ‘Departure’, ‘Leaving’, ‘Return’. Some of these are courageous confrontations with painful experiences, especially the excoriating ‘Listening’, which evokes childhood memories of a paternal tyranny at the dinner table, and the moving pieces about the death of a loved mother.
A second section is largely given over to grief and loss, especially the illness and death of a younger brother, as in ‘Season’ (‘Is this season my brother’s “time to die”?’), and the moving four-part ‘Requiescat’. Other poems memorialise departed friends, notably ‘Looking Back’, in memory of musician Frederick Page in New Zealand and Paris: ‘He met his artist wife at a Christchurch party. / When she came in she saw him and pulled a face. / “I thought at once, that’s the person I’ll marry”.’
The book’s third part foregrounds writing, and in particular the physical placing of words on paper. As might be expected from an authority on Graves, Ward’s poems are acutely aware of line, stanza and overall form. He seldom rhymes (but does so occasionally with purpose), and his poems are always shapely, well-managed, clear and economical in phrasing, and formally satisfying. There is an astonishing variety of forms: stanzas of everything from two to eight lines, varying in line length from short (‘She Sings the Poet’) to long (‘Between the Lines’); while others are less standardised, such as the longish ‘Friendship’ addressed to Vincent O’Sullivan (one of two) in a dozen parts of varying length, beginning with a memory of their meeting over Graves’s poems in Waikato University Library, and ending: ‘One of the great blessings of my life; / friendship given, like grace’. Other poets celebrated in these pages are Elizabeth Bishop, Douglas Oliver and the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa appears in what is one of the best poems in the book, ‘In Search of Pessoa’, which connects discovering the poet in an anthology in Christchurch in 1965, to visiting Lisbon ‘in quest of the poet of that city’, and ends with reading in Paris (in Portuguese) the same poem that he had first encountered half a century before.
The fourth part of Departures is mostly devoted to poems of Parisian scenes and occasions, but there are also a number of others of merit on widely different subjects, such as ‘Constanza’, about the murderous jealousy of the sculptor Bernini, or ‘Seven Venice Glasses’ which evoke the fabled city through specimens of its many-coloured glassware, or ‘Accent’, about the varieties of speech as identifying markers, which ends:
Not the least advantage of living in Paris:
No-one expects me to sound the same as them,
And so I can feel at home not feeling at home.
The last line could almost serve as epigraph for this richly various collection, which distils a lifetime of experience and reading into poems of great poise and humanity
At forty-two pages Leonard Lambert’s Slow Fires is more a chapbook than a slim volume. It is his seventh collection since 1980, including Somewhere in August, a Selected Poems published by Steele Roberts in 2016. A full-time painter (‘Forgotten Knowledge’ is reproduced on the cover), he lives in Napier and is approaching eighty. Age and the perspective it brings (as with the other two books under review) are a continuous presence, often explicitly and sometimes obliquely. Take the title poem, for instance:
Love-Hate, Despair-Delight—
these elevated categories —
exaggerants —
are never the stuff
of everyday life.
But this distrust of extremes
is not driving-with-the-brake-on.
It is not ‘lukewarm’.
It is not the flight from feeling
that the strung might imagine.
It is the real of Like
& Quite-enjoy—fawn
& beige to the young—
But Ah, slow fires,
How much longer do they burn!
This is a fair specimen of what Lambert can do. It is almost defensively modest in tone and attitude, though ‘exaggerants’ is unexpected—not in the dictionary, except as a Catalan word differently spelled; a neologism, then, but clear in meaning. The writer uses other verbal devices—hyphenated phrases (‘driving-with-the-brake-on’), pointed use of quote marks (‘lukewarm’), unexpected phrasing (instead of ‘young’ we get ‘strung’, but then ‘young’ turns up as an internal rhyme), to activate through tone and metaphor (‘slow fires’), a worthy if unremarkable sentiment.
The book reads as a sort of private journal; the occasional jottings of a sensitive and intelligent man reflecting on life and the world in the face of its demise. There are poems of memory (‘Remembered Land’), sickness and recovery (‘Going home today’), philosophical reflection (‘Misconstruction’), confronting death (‘The Ticking Body’, ‘Leaving’), natural observation (‘Elements’, which describes pigeons in flight), anthropological speculation (‘Hominids/Feminids’), musical commentary (‘Beethoven’s 9th’), political assertion (‘War Dream’) and environmental musings (‘Summers ago’, which is about the disappearance of insect life)— quite a range, indeed. Given that the author is also a painter, one might have expected a stronger visual component than the poems offer. The foregrounding of a visual image in ‘Leaving’ is comparatively rare:
At the far end of autumn,
the very edge of winter,
the last of the leaves are a-skelter—
a horde of panicky late-goers,
some aloft and wind-mad,
the bigger ones, brown & brittle,
skidding along crab-wise,
clawing their way south…
But as the poem develops, the visual becomes metaphoric, and the poem turns sententious:
It looks almost direction,
this rush-and-tumble,
but the end we know, is only dust,
soil for the new, and among those
will not be us, my love,
neither me nor you.
Slow Fires offers most to the reader as a sort of end-of-life report card, touched with wonder, tinged with sadness, bravely free from illusion, as in ‘Karrinyup Optical Clinic’, about his English-born parents who ended up in Western Australia:
How far-flung & scattered at all now seems,
and you listen for the tribal drum,
the home-song, and wonder if anywhere,
or everywhere, is where you belong.
The Glass Guitar is a first posthumous collection of thirty-three poems, most previously unpublished or uncollected, by the Dunedin poet Peter Olds, who died in 2023, aged seventy-nine, over fifty years after his first book was published in 1972. The poems have been assembled by Roger Hickin, whose Cold Hub Press published the book, and by John Gibb, who has provided a five-page Introduction. Dates appended to some of the poems range between 1984 and 2019, a spread of thirty-five years. It is evident from internal evidence in the poems that Olds was quite a hoarder of old manuscripts with a habit of returning to incomplete or abandoned poems to see what could be salvaged or resurrected. In ‘Fixing old poems’ he writes:
… I drag out the dregs
I couldn’t throw away
feeling there’s something there
I haven’t spotted yet,
waiting for a time when
my eye would be clearer
and less fogged by thoughts
of fame and failure.
The reviews didn’t come,
I don’t blame myself
or the buying public.
The magic stanza was a fizzer …
There’s lots to appeal about the persona presented in this and other poems: a wry self-awareness, a lack of grandiosity, but a firm self-belief in the value of the craft and his life-long commitment to it. There’s plenty of verbal cunning on display, too, as when he subverts the expected ‘fame and fortune’ by the phrasing, ‘fame and failure’.
A child of the Manse, Olds is several times depicted here in conversation with his elder and mentor James K. Baxter, who likewise had his origins in Presbyterianism and subsequent rebellion. In ‘Talking to Baxter’, in which Olds confesses to having ‘retired on the Hill: / write bourgeois poems … / occasionally think of you’. In ‘Airmail to Baxter’, he assumes mock anger towards his encourager:
If I hadn’t listened to you & your sweet
voice telling me my poems were great,
I wouldn’t be writing this drivel
on a bus heading for Maori Hill
& oblivion!
One of the older and longer pieces, ‘Jerusalem Revisited’ (sub-titled ‘a notebook record’), narrates a hitch-hiking return, including a damp night in a sleeping bag under the stars, to the village of Hiruharama, sharing tea and pikelets with the friendly locals where Hemi the guru held forth a decade and a half earlier. He visits the tidy grave; shares Māori bread with people at the pa; would like to be asked to stay but isn’t invited (‘You don’t push’); and heads back down the valley and a bus ride back to the city. There’s no grand revelation or reassessment of past experience, as if the unemphatic and inconsequential narrative is itself the main outcome of the exercise. A photograph of Olds and Baxter together, presumably at Jerusalem, in a collage by Kathryn Madill, hand-coloured by Olds, which turns the old mates into a pair of floating ghosts, makes an appropriate cover for the book.
The longest poem in the collection is ‘A bucket of fish heads’; a sequence in sixteen parts from 2015. It vividly calls up childhood memories of selling newspapers outside Carisbrook during a rugby shield match between Otago and Southland. Stacked with nostalgic references—Perry Como, Randy Stone, ‘Love Letters in the Sand’, milk bars and teddy boys, the Evening Star Seven O’Clock Sports Edition, ‘Fish heads & greasies for tea’—it brings the 1950s alive and makes it easy to understand why Olds has been affectionately adopted as a kind of unofficial laureate of Dunedin.
All three of these worthwhile and well-produced books come from Cold Hub Press adding further titles to its already substantial and admirable list of local poetry. It’s an enterprise well worthy of support.
PETER SIMPSON writes about literature and art and is an occasional curator, most recently of the exhibition ‘Artists and Letters, Pictures and Words’ (with Robyn Notman) at Hocken Collections. His most recent book is Dear Colin, Dear Ron: The selected letters of Colin McCahon and Ron O’Reilly (Te Papa Press, 2024).
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