Iain Sharp
Koe: An Aotearoa Ecopoetry anthology edited by Janet Newman and Robert Sullivan (Otago University Press, 2024), 299pp, $50
Shane Jones, Minister for Resources in the coalition government, is an adroit stand-up comedian. Thus it was with seasoned deadpan demeanour and expert timing, when addressing the House last December on further exploration of the Wharekirauponga forest by the multinational company OceanaGold, that he came out with this zinger: ‘If there is a mining opportunity and it’s impeded by a blind frog, goodbye, Freddie.’ Appalled environmentalists were quick to point out that the endangered amphibians, pepeketua (Leiopelma archeyi), can see quite well and they are known in English not as Freddies or Freddos, like Cadbury’s batrachian chocolate bar, but as Archey’s frogs, in honour of English-born Christchurch-educated zoologist Gilbert Archey.
Though the anthology under review was compiled long before the Freddie speech, a prime motive for putting such a collection together was surely to oppose the ruthless profit-driven ethos that Shane Jones promotes. Almost any of the poems selected by editors Janet Newman and Robert Sullivan would serve as an effective counterblast to the Minister for Resources, but I would like to focus for a moment on Richard Reeve’s ‘The Old Breed’, which salutes an unnamed ‘old outcrop / professor, ecologist-irritant to the corporates, / friend of a just farmer, foe of the plain greedy’. Gilbert Archey was a principled scholar of this kind. Later examples include epidemiologist Ian Prior and entomologist John T. Salmon, the two determined ecowarriors who led the protest against the raising of Lake Manapouri in the 1960s.
In their introductory notes Newman and Sullivan identify the Manapouri campaign as pivotal in the growth of New Zealanders’ awareness of ecological issues. They also cite the importance of American marine biologist Rachel Carson’s excoriating 1962 exposé Silent Spring, an international bestseller, in changing attitudes towards the environment. I have no quarrel with either of these propositions, but I would add that Salmon’s Heritage Destroyed, published two years before Carson’s book, had a comparable impact within New Zealand. Nor can I resist mentioning that it was by personal request from Prior, who was married to Charles Brasch’s cousin and acquainted with many of the writers of his day, that Denis Glover wrote the Manapouri poem that appears in the anthology.
Debate over the ownership and control of land is so central to the New Zealand narrative that, had the numerical format not become rather overworked, Newman and Sullivan might have subtitled their book ‘A History of Aotearoa in 100 Poems’. Opting for a broadly chronological arrangement, they split their bilingual gathering into three sections: works by authors born before 1900, the twentieth century and the present day.
The first section documents the collision of opposing worldviews. The Māori way of thinking about the natural world has always been communal and reverential. When tangata whenua say who they are, the pepeha (traditional form of introduction) includes not only the tribe and sub-tribe with whom they identify but also the mountain, river and meeting place. They look upon the plants, birds and other creatures that share their home territory as kin, animated by the same wairua or life force as they are. Awareness of, interest in and patience with traditional Māori concepts among colonising Britons was generally slight. The early European settlers were closer in mindset to Shane Jones, regarding the land mainly in terms of opportunity—a means of advancing one’s personal fortune through the acquisition of property and the sale of resources (timber, coal, gold and, after livestock had been shipped in, wool, milk and meat). True, the poets among them were aware of a loss of beauty (‘the resinous, sharp scent of pines’, ‘the sense of noiseless sweet escape’, ‘the pleasant rustlings’, ‘the silvery fern fronds’, ‘the sylvan Parthenon’, to quote some of William Pemberton Reeves’s mouth-filling phrases) in the conversion of once grand forests into pasture, but they considered the clearances an inevitable phase in advancing civilisation. Their laments for the vanished grandeur remind me of Lewis Carroll’s Walrus and Carpenter weeping as they gobble up all the oysters. I ought not to be too hard on Dunedin settler Alexander Bathgate, who did, after all, found one of the country’s first conservation societies in 1887, but I think his perplexed verses on the disappearance of bellbirds deserve some kind of prize (a rat’s tail or stoat’s paw perhaps?) for unwitting comedy:
Thy doom is fixed by Nature’s law;
Why, none can tell.
Therefore farewell …
The middle section of the anthology shows Māori and Pakeha continuing to live largely separate lives in the twentieth century, with writers from each community voicing different concerns. The colonists and their offspring were too preoccupied with their own fragile sense of belonging to spare much thought for the damage done to the indigenous people’s sense of selfhood through seizure of ancestral territory. Some importations from the homeland, intended to create a more cosily familiar world for the settlers, proved disastrous, such as rabbits, introduced in the 1860s as sporting targets that would add variety to the dinner table, and those omnivorous executioners, ferrets, released in their thousands in the 1880s as a desperate attempt to fix the pasture-wrecking rabbit menace.
Unsurprisingly, the middle section contains some poems already well-known from other anthologies, such as Brasch’s ‘The Land and the People’ and Curnow’s ‘House and Land’, but they are revivified, I think, by the ecological context brought to bear on them. I was particularly struck by Ruth Dallas’s ‘Pioneer Woman with Ferrets’, with its central figure abiding by the highly gendered clothing proprieties of her time (cinched waist, voluminous skirt, sun hat to shield her fair complexion) while supervising her children as they block rabbit warrens with wire netting and delivering the death blows herself with a club. In fewer than eighty words Dallas manages to convey a whole era, living up to her early nom-de-plume ‘Multum-in-parvo’ (‘a great deal in a small space’).
The first half of the twentieth century was scarred by global conflict and the second half was fraught with fears of nuclear disaster. On 1 September 1939, when World War II was declared, Te Awamutu farmer Donald McDonald cast an eye over his paddocks, reflected on the years of toil needed to create them, wondered if the labour would all come to nothing and recorded his thoughts in conventional rhymed metre but with a rhythmic command second to none in this anthology. Sadly, he was among the 118 New Zealand prisoners of war who perished in August 1942 when the Italian ship transporting them across the Mediterranean from Libya was torpedoed by a British submarine. Four years later, while serving as a corporal with Jayforce in southern Honshu, Hone Tuwhare witnessed firsthand the post-bomb desolation of Hiroshima. His dignified requiem ‘No Ordinary Sun’ remains one of the most powerful statements gathered by Newman and Sullivan, but they also pick up four fine poems—by writers as disparate in style and background as Lauris Edmond, Keri Hulme, Harry Ricketts and Ngahuia Te Awekotuku—from Beneath the Surface, a 1995 collection published as a fundraiser for the peace flotilla that decried French tests on the Moruroa atoll.
If anxiety over nuclear extinction is less prevalent in the third section of the anthology, it’s not because the threat from weapons of mass destruction has abated. Even as I write this review, the airspace over parts of the globe is abrim with missiles. But annihilation now seems as likely to come from other sources: planet-wide pollution, global warming, rising tides and weather ‘events’, (as we nowadays term catastrophes wrecking the lives of thousands). In their poem ‘2050’ Ash Davida Jane envisages a ‘sulphur-red sky’ so clogged with filth it can be used as a backdrop to ‘project squares of blue / with white blurs passing across’ as a bogus reassurance. In ‘All That Summer’ Tim Jones imagines Wellington as a ‘drowned isthmus’ with ‘Miramar Island bulking east’ and diving for ‘relics of better days’ one of the few remaining ways to occupy one’s time. Van Mei, one of the youngest writers in the anthology, sees little hope of reaching middle age before the world becomes so toxic that whoever’s left will be forced to relocate (but to where exactly?), abandoning the earth to the tuataras and cockroaches.
The interconnectedness of all living matter is one of the anthology’s big themes and in the third section this leads to a weighing of the global repercussions of bad decisions. Erik Kennedy’s eye-opening contribution argues that by continuing to buy phosphate from Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara, when other countries have desisted, New Zealand is complicit not just in the physical despoliation of that region but in human rights violations against the indigenous Sahrawi people. Railing against the spillage of 1700 tonnes of heavy fuel oil from the container ship Rena, which grounded on the Astrolabe Reef in October 2011 (‘how dare you, / poison the swells and the realm of Tangaroa’), Tauranga poet Te Kahu Rolleston points his finger at ‘followers of capitalism’. While broadly agreeing with him, I would add that the complexities of international commerce are not that easy to follow. German-built, owned by a South African conglomerate, sailing under a Liberian flag, insured by the Swedish Club, Rena arrived in New Zealand waters from China.
The Māori part of the anthology’s title carries a wealth of meaning in its three letters. ‘Koe’ can signify a scream as well as a bird call, but the word is most familiar to us in the phrase ‘tena koe’, the greeting used for one-on-one encounters. Since each of us is being addressed intimately and individually, how can we readers pretend not to hear the cry of distress or act as if the parlous state of the planet is somebody else’s business, not ours?
The English part of the title immediately begs the question: what counts as ecopoetry and what doesn’t? Poets have always written about landscape and animals, especially birds. Can every versifier back to ancient Sumerian times be embraced then under a broad ecopoetry umbrella? Some schools of thought say yes. Others are sterner in their admission policy, insisting on a political dimension or a polemical intent. Though not entirely unbending, Newman and Sullivan tend towards the latter persuasion. The emphasis in the anthology is on mourning and warning.
Seven different poets bewail the demise of the huia. Through the hard work of determined conservationists in establishing predator-free zones, two other hitherto endangered wattlebirds—the kieke (saddleback) and North Island kōkako—have been rescued from extinction. Surely this is worth celebrating? But is a celebratory tone permissible in ecopoetry? Elsewhere, perhaps, but not in this anthology. Newman and Sullivan have carefully curated their selections to create an impression of steadily increasing planetary imperilment. Flashes of cheerfulness would wreck the sense of impending doom.
The editors have such a firm grasp of what they want to show us that complaining about omissions (rather than emissions) seems churlishly disruptive. I note some of the famous names that are missing (Fairburn, Frame, Hyde, O’Sullivan, Stead, Tse) and have a fleeting curiosity as to why, but the collection succeeds, I think, on its own terms. It’s a sombre read overall, but deliberately so.
There are, however, two voices I really miss from the anthology: Newman and Sullivan themselves. While I respect their humility in not pushing their own green-barrows, I think it’s a pity their work is not included. Over the last three decades Sullivan has gradually grown into the role of rangatira, steeped in the whole history of waiata and able to address questions of Māori identity with an authority second to none. Newman, meanwhile, writes from the unique perspective (and contrary pulls) of being simultaneously an ardent environmentalist and a fourth-generation Horowhenua beef farmer. I recommend to readers of this anthology that they also take a look at Newman’s master’s and doctoral theses from Massey University (both available online), which not only extend the discussion of ecopoetry but include generous samplings of her own verse, which is unlike anything else currently being written in this country.
IAIN SHARP has published five books of poetry, and his work has appeared in a number of poetry anthologies. In 2001 he edited the inaugural edition of the online annual anthology Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems. Formerly an Auckland literary journalist and librarian, he is nowadays based in Nelson.
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