Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Struggling Out of a European Crucible

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Tasha Haines
Dark Arts, by Leo Bensemann, edited by Peter Simpson (Holloway Press, Auckland) Edition of 100. $300.
 
Dark Arts is a collection of mostly unpublished essays given as talks by Leo Bensemann circa the 1950s on the subjects of the history of printing, typography, book illustration, graphic arts, the Caxton Press, and The Group. Peter Simpson uncovered the essays during his research for his book Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann (Auckland University Press, 2011). Leo Bensemann (1912–1986) was remarkably a printmaker/illustrator, typographer, printer, and painter. He was born in Takaka, New Zealand of German and Anglo-Irish ancestry. Bensemann didn’t do well at school, which in no way hampered his later success. Peter Simpson calls him an ‘autodidact’ who ‘took to printing like a duck to water.’ Bensemann was involved at the inception of Christchurch’s Caxton Press in 1935 under Denis Glover. He was also a member of a group of artists working in Christchurch from 1927 known as The Group and including (at various times) the likes of Rita Angus, Colin McCahon, Doris Lusk, and Toss Woollaston.
            Simpson says in the introduction to Dark Arts that the book is ‘not an original contribution to history or theory’. He suggests that it is rather more intimate than that, as a notebook or journal might be. It is a ‘place where original ideas can be seen first hand.’ Both Fantastica and Dark Arts reveal the character and contribution of Leo Bensemann, but they do it in different ways; where Fantastica is a judiciously illustrated ‘coffee table book’ that carefully explains the key works and biographical details of Bensemann’s career, Dark Arts shows the man himself ‘talking’ about his topics in his articulate and rousing manner; it is a book for the initiated, right down to its manifesto-style cover inscribed with Bensemann’s occult-ish heraldic crest. The hefty price of $300 for the book also requires a certain degree of commitment on the behalf of the buyer-reader.

[Read more…]

Appassionato

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Helen Watson White
The Violinist: Clare Galambos Winter, Holocaust Survivor, by Sarah Gaitanos (Victoria University Press, 2011) 280 pp., $40.00.

‘On the morning of Sunday 19 March 1944, Klari was at an orchestra rehearsal in the Heavy Metalworkers’ Trades Hall when a man burst in with an urgent message for the conductor. Obviously shaken, the conductor informed the players that Germany had occupied Hungary, the army had entered Budapest and its tanks were rolling down the main boulevard. As the extreme left wing Trades Hall would be an early target, they must pack up their instruments and leave immediately, taking different routes. “Go, go, go!” he urged the stunned, mostly Jewish musicians.’
          ‘Klari’ is longtime Wellington resident Clare Galambos Winter, who, having lost most of her family in the Holocaust, survived to reach New Zealand in 1949 and make a new life in which music figured centrally.
           Sarah Gaitanos has read and journeyed widely in order to understand and present a complex historical context for what is also a very personal story. Nolar Millar, her first biography, about legendary Wellington theatre director the late Nola Millar, published in 2006, was similarly thorough, running to 408 packed pages. The Violinist, which like Nola Millar, contains an index, copious notes and a full bibliography, is more rather than less interesting for the many different research tracks she goes down. In addition to book and journal sources, a list of websites — such as www.jewishvirtuallibrary — gives readers an entrée into the extensive Holocaust literature, encompassing official records, photographs and oral history recorded over sixty-five postwar years.

          The main difference with The Violinist is that Gaitanos was able to develop a relationship with her living subject, Clare. This allowed the recording of invaluable oral interviews and full access to Clare’s own memoirs, letters, as well as a large collection of photographs — not only of her Hungarian relatives, but also of her ‘new family’ of New Zealand friends.
          Born in 1923, Clare Galambos Winter was descended from Jewish immigrants who became ‘passionately’ committed to Hungary, after emancipation in 1867, helping form the core of the country’s professional elite. Andor Galambos, her father, had also served in Hungary’s army on the side of Germany in World War I; like the many German Jews who fought for the Kaiser, he felt betrayed by his country when the Hungarian government brought in anti-Jewish laws.
          As Clare was growing up between the wars, it was with her mother’s extended family, ‘liberal, well-educated and non-religious’, that she most strongly identified, especially when they gathered for summer holidays. ‘With its parkland and forest,’ writes Gaitanos, ‘the family estate at Nemeskolta belongs to Clare’s dreamtime memories of an enchanted childhood’, with ‘a big annual hunt, wonderful harvest festivals, tennis parties, gypsy music, colourful costumes, dances and concerts. Klari’s father sang and everyone played the piano.’
Music was at the heart of this pre-war life. Klari’s grandmother introduced her to the classics, playing piano music of Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms; her great-aunt was a student of Liszt in Vienna. Klari, who sang regularly in the synagogue choir, learnt to play the piano first, and then — what became a lifelong commitment — the violin. As a teenager, she found ‘a beautiful meshing together of people’ in a local orchestra.
          Shocking stories started to reach the fourteen-year-old Klari — of Germany’s invasion of Austria, and of ‘people they knew being arrested and not heard of again.’ (Since 1922, the Galambos family had lived in Szombathely, close to the Austrian border.) Hitler — popularly called the ‘mad dog’ — was not, however, considered a threat to ‘civilized’ Hungary. Besides, wrote Clare in her three-part memoir, ‘there seemed to be more important things to think about, such as school, music, violin, boys …’.
          Gaitanos makes a very good job of knitting together the parallel rise of fascist powers in Germany and Hungary, with legislation denying Jews’ rights to travel, trade or work other than forced labour, and finally to any kind of citizenship at all. She also describes how personal reports of atrocities in Poland were at first thought not to be credible, since they were so extreme. Elie Wiesel himself did not, she discovered, believe the deportations and slaughter described by one witness who had escaped execution in 1942.
          In that year Klari was studying violin, music history, theory and orchestral practice in Budapest at the Fodor, a private music academy. Athough the rumours in her girls’ hostel were ‘terrifying’, few knew of the Nazis’ Wannsee meeting of January 1942, in which agreement was reached on the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’. In 1943, even when informed of the many death camps in full operation, Hungary’s Jewish leaders shut their ears and ignored the implications. The subsequent German occupation of Hungary in March 1944 stunned them, along with the whole country.
          Gaitanos could not have invented a more shocking and dramatic turning-point to her story. Klari hurriedly prepares to return home to her family, but at the station — wearing a ‘very smart’ blue coat with yellow fox-fur and carrying violin, handbag and hatbox — she is shoved into a concrete room to stand for three nights, crammed in tightly with thirty other women whose only crime is that they’re Jews. In a matter of weeks the recently built ghetto in her town is being emptied out by the first transports of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz, in ‘the largest and fastest deportation operation of the Holocaust’.
          Maps, diagrams and photos of the complex and of the inmates at Auschwitz-Birkenau help make real an experience that Clare can only dimly recall: ‘I stepped out of myself and anything that happened there … was so far from what I was. I never even thought of my violin. I never thought of anything.’ The chance of surviving was, however, greater ‘if you had someone’, and for Klari that was her aunt Rozsi, who ‘slept, sat, stood to be counted, queued for food, cared for’ her through five weeks at Birkenau and seven months at Allendorf, where the pair worked at a munitions factory over a winter that was ‘exceptionally harsh’.
          After liberation in 1945, aunt and niece returned home, expecting to be re-united with family members — a hope that proved hollow. Only one cousin remained to welcome them; Clare wrote in her memoir: ‘It was beyond ordinary grief. It was utter nihil.’ There was another cousin, though, who had gone to New Zealand before the war, who offered to help them emigrate here. After two years of intense difficulty in an environment ‘morally, socially, politically and economically bankrupt’, Klari and Rozsi left Europe on a steamship from Marseilles.
          At this point (Chapter 7), a second biography begins: the life of 25-year-old violinist Clare, living with her Aunt Rosie in a two-storey art-deco house in Lower Hutt, and artistically ‘adopted’ by a Wellington family, the McKenzies. Because the cousin’s family who helped their immigration did not want to publish their own Jewishness, Clare was at first cut off from Wellington’s Hungarian community, who were mostly Jews. Clare found another community among Wellington’s musicians, when she auditioned for an orchestra within weeks of arrival. There were Jews in this community too, among refugee musicians of the pre-war diaspora, and later among the many distinguished musical visitors to the city.
          The book’s final four chapters, or ‘movements’ – Appassionato, Resoluto, Doloroso, Grazioso – follow Clare’s 32-year career with the National Orchestra under different conductors and names, rehearsing, travelling and performing all over the country — and overseas; her ‘joyous and bohemian’ life with Swedish cellist and bandsman Karl Kallhagen, whom she later married; her learning to become a New Zealander, taking citizenship in 1955 and buying a house in Mt Victoria; Rosie’s death in 1965 and Karl’s in 1977; her close friendship with Carol McKenzie and Carol’s illness and death; love and marriage with her doctor, Otto Winter, with whom she returned to the synagogue, and his death in 1990.
Many lives, indeed: not just one, even in two halves.
          Music was always important to Clare as representing, beyond language and circumstance, a shared humanity. It was her solace in Allendorf when the officers gave her a violin to play so that they could dance; later, in Wellington, when events like the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann ‘stirred the pot’ uncomfortably, she took to the music with a passion that blew away everything but the playing. It may be said that the Holocaust ‘defined her’; then again it was music which both recalled her suffering, says Gaitanos, and transcended it. Clare herself describes the ‘shattering’ music of Shostakovich as ‘like flying into some absolutely rarefied air’.
          This, however, is a biography which is essentially down-to-earth and faithful in the telling of a life-story. However, just as the Nola Millar biography gave a detailed sense of Wellington’s interconnected theatre life in the 1950s and 1960s, and of the development of Toi Whakaari, the New Zealand Drama School, so The Violinist: Clare Galambos Winter, Holocaust Survivor offers, together with its many other strands, a richly interesting take on the development of classical music performance locally, along with an account of the rise of what has become a world-class musical institution: the National Orchestra — now known as the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.



HELEN WATSON WHITE has degrees in English and theology from the University of Otago, and for five years was sole editor at University of Otago Press. She is a freelance editor, writer and arts reviewer.

Please Hold

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Kiran Dass
Bird North and Other Stories, by Breton Dukes (Victoria University Press 2011) 191 pp., $35.00.

A quick squizz at a good deal of the latest New Zealand poetry and fiction releases reveals a deeply dismal trend in bland, uninspiring book covers in sedate and muted shades of beige, white or grey. Utterly unappealing, they tragically look like bereavement handbooks.
          Northland writer Breton Dukes’ debut Birth North and Other Stories however, shakes off this fusty image, opting instead to slyly beckon the reader with a striking cartoony illustration courtesy of Dylan Horrocks. I initially thought the cover was an odd choice — perhaps a touch too lighthearted for what people keep banging on about as being stories which are concerned with pushing a masculine ‘Man Alone’ angle. But when I say this, I don’t mean in the John Mulgan or Bill Pearson tradition. After reading Dukes’ stories, the cover makes perfect sense. This book looks and reads like a collection for young adults. These are gateway stories  — that is, the characters only just allude to having any shred of insight.
          This is a plain, no-frills collection of seventeen stories. Dukes’ bongtastic characters drink from beer-filled V bottles, attend dull seminars to apply for call-centre jobs, work in hospitals, spy on their flatmates having sex, and chiefly struggle to relate to the people around them — and themselves.
          It’s terrific that while these stories are set in recognisable locations across New Zealand such as Te Anau, the Coromandel, Johnsonville, the East Coast and Dunedin, Dukes isn’t that fixated on landscape and location. It appears that he is more interested in character. Particularly how men relate to each other and to their environment. I get the impression that Dukes is sticking to the safe confines of writing about what he knows, having worked in Government call-centres and hospitals himself. The only trouble is that his characters aren’t strong enough to pull the stories along.
          However, Pontoon, a story about an art student who attends a two-day seminar to test his suitability for a position working the phones at the Emergency Services’ 111 call-centre is a terrific piece. Dukes dryly captures the pathos of employment workshops. From the man who brings his own pens (and who no doubt lines them up in front of him on the desk in an orderly fashion), a woman named Shona (for some reason, there is always a ‘Shona’ at these things, isn’t there?), to the ‘nicotine slaves’ who dash outside for a furtive tea-break puff, and a territorial soldier — the characters here are spot on. However, Pontoon ends on a baffling and woolly note about a pod of dolphins. Here, Dukes should have refrained from trying to be deep.
          I know these characters are supposed to be laconic and ‘masculine’ but I don’t think Dukes gives his cast enough credit. I think that in many cases, it is stoic and quiet men who have some of the keenest insights. In these stories, any insight the characters have (whether that be internally or externally demonstrated) is entirely surface level. There’s nothing really there. I wanted these people to have a bit more oomph. More bite in the characters could have elevated these stories to a knowing greatness. Instead, the characters mostly come across as mealy-mouthed, shiftless, shaggy-brained slackers. And you just know there must be a lot more going on with them if only we could scratch below that grimy surface. On the whole, these are polite stories.
          With its distinct chiaroscuro atmosphere, Racquet is a neat, moody and clear-sighted story. I loved the depressingly helpless, awkward and domestic set up.
          Standout stunner for me though, is The Moon, a gentle down-the-line story which shows Dukes is not afraid of the quiet moments. Here, he shows us how the child informs what the adult becomes:

“Peter was five when his father said to him, ‘Your mum’s gone to the moon. She has some special work to do. I don’t know when she’ll be back.’”

Which Peter later counters with:

“People can’t live on the moon. Mrs Thompson told us.”

The scene is vivid, Dukes sets it up evocatively. There is: ‘a bottle of tomato sauce upside down on the table. A fly was crawling over the dried sauce around its neck.”’
           Using minutiae and delicate observation, Dukes creates a story which is at once tender and sweet but also hopeless and melancholy. Don’t get me wrong, Dukes doesn’t romanticise Peter’s situation — Peter turns into a bit of a deadbeat. This is tangible stuff — we all know people like this. Dukes just offers us an insight into or angle on how people turn out the way they do. The scene where Peter sees his father leaning on a fence ‘just before Ashburton’ sent a chill through me.
           It is stories like The Moon which hint that Dukes must have some greatness in him. I’d like to see him dig a bit deeper, get stuck into what is beyond the superficial surface, think a bit more about his characterisation and perhaps try his hand at some long form fiction.

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KIRAN DASS is a Wellington-based writer who has written about music, film and books for the NZ Listener, Sunday Star-Times, Metro, Pavement, Real Groove, Rip it Up, New Zealand Musician, NZ Herald, Dominion Post and Staple.

Myth-eaten: JKB’s Habits of Mind

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John Dennison
The Snake-Haired Muse: James K. Baxter and Classical Myth, by GeoffreyMiles, John Davidson and Paul Millar, (Victoria University Press, 2011), 380 pp., $50.00.

Surely, it is the Orphic quest: three literary scholars descend to the realm of dead reputations, intent on reviving that haunting incommensurability, the sad remains of James K. Baxter’s myth-eaten verse. And we, who once sang with Curnow et al. that Old Romantic NZ was dead and gone, with Jimmy in the grave, might once more find ourselves returning to the Collected Poems with a renewed liveliness of mind—and a Penguin edition of the writings of Carl Jung.
The Snake-Haired Muse is this revisionist descent. The problem of Baxter and myth, as the authors point out, has long occasioned embarrassed side-steps by a roll call of local critics at his anachronistic, even elitist, affectation, thoroughly incongruous with that most pressing of poetics, reality ‘special and local’. These latter-day Orphic critics have now arrived to argue that, ‘Baxter’s use of classical myth […] lies close to the heart of his poetic project; […] the criticisms made of it often rest on assumptions about poetry in New Zealand — what it is and what it should be — that are positively unhelpful in dealing with the kind of poetry that Baxter was trying to write’ (18).
            What makes this endeavour so successful is that (unlike Orpheus) it achieves its quiet yet determined revisionism by means of a long, hard scholarly look backwards, back into the turgid yet quite consistent introspection of the adolescent Baxter, and looking back, too, to take in the full scope of his classical baggage in unpublished as well as published works.
            Beginning with the modest aspiration of offering a specialist guide to classical myth in Baxter’s poetry, Geoffrey Miles, John Davidson and Paul Millar expected ‘that the substantial strand of early classical myth poems would thin, at times break, and eventually interweave with Christian belief and Maori tikanga to produce a more twentieth-century, New Zealand-sourced kit of mythic themes. […T]his isn’t what we discovered’ (248). In other words, this level-headed, convivial piece of revisionary criticism is no poetry anthology introduction; its case for Baxter as ‘unapologetically mythic, enduringly Romantic, and idiosyncratically religious’ rests on meticulous scholarship, painstakingly re-contextualising the published poetry alongside the swags of unpublished material in the archives. Brief indulgences of literary obsession (Miles’s regret over our not knowing whether Baxter read of Jason or Ulysses first; Davidson delighting in a bit of detective work over Baxter’s knowledge of a painting by Exekias) are guarantees of such.
What the scholarship reveals is not just the scope of Baxter’s engagement with the classics, but also the consistency of his recourse to myth, and the way in which it was impelled by personal exigencies: by a kind of enduring need for existential order that began in his adolescence. It is Millar’s chapter on Baxter’s adolescent use of myth that puts paid to the old charge that Baxter’s mythic material is an elitist affectation, showing how the poet’s idiosyncratic, appropriating mythic method, ‘initiated at sixteen and continuing throughout his remaining lifetime of writing, is a habit of mind essential for an understanding of Baxter’ (54). The mythic matter, then, confronts us with the poet’s habitual method: Baxter’s ‘lifelong habit of plucking from every system of thought he encountered only those that meshed with his personal convictions’ (41).
At best, habits are sustaining, improvisatory patterns; no surprise then that in his last days Baxter wrote some of his finest myth poems — ‘The Tiredness of Me and Herakles’, is a sequence that is emotionally complete, and un-schematic in its idiosyncratic appropriation of the classics. But then, habits of mind are also fickle things, more fickle, perhaps, than those of the absent-minded hand, for they frequently combine instinctive reaction with reasoned justification, the personal urge to scratch a mental itch with a well-plotted, but often specious rationale.
The revelation that Baxter’s regular recourse to the classics is thoroughly habitual not only highlights its importance for understanding his poetics, but also suggests why the results were so uneven. Certainly, as O’Sullivan made clear decades back, Baxter’s mythologizing is more than merely egotistical; still, it seems clear that Baxter’s myth-habit began and ended with personal need, and was finally less about connecting to the collective unconsciousness of mainstream 1950s New Zealand  than it was about his long-standing need to get a fix — a psycho-spiritual fix, that is — on himself. When confronted with such heady classical fusions as herring-bone Jimmy’s ‘Snake-Haired Muse’, what strikes one is not only their hyper-schematic nature, but also the way in which such universalised projections of the troubled self leave so little room for the reader. When, as in Baxter’s binary and somewhat infantile preoccupation with rising Venus and the infernal feminine, the exigencies of the personal drama are forced through the Jungian schema (or at least justified by such afterwards), the poetry — and our pleasure — suffer. Viewed one way, then, to take in the scope and character of Baxter’s myth-habit can be to find oneself playing a bit-part in a personal drama that is either overbearing in its impelling neediness, or emotionally truncated by the myth-mapping of late modernity.
In taking such matters personally, the most useful response may well be to pursue the opportunity this book makes possible: to contextualise more thoroughly and then evaluate the late modern religious aspiration of what Millar describes as Baxter’s ‘lifelong production of intricate, relatively consistent structures of meaning’ (61). As Miles suggests, the basic problem that Baxter’s response to the classics presents us with ‘is not “phoniness” or “disingenuousness” so much as a passionate belief in the power of myth to communicate on a deep, unconscious level’ (20). Baxter’s habit of mind has — after Jung — a doctrinaire rationale; myth is the collective repository of humankind across time and space, the point of union of body and mind; in poetic practice, it is the reconciliation and liberation of the authentic self in its conflicted manifestations (Baxter’s preference for Jung has to do with the fact that, as he sees it, the Jungian sponsors a psychological rejoinder to the caricature of Calvinism that Baxter loves to hate: the prospect that ‘my subconscious mind might contain sources of peace and wisdom’).
            This use of myth addresses the post-Christian conditions of belief, offering — as a locus of the pre-rational and natural — a way out of the epistemological reductiveness of late Enlightenment rationalism while still aspiring to some total, fundamental schema; it is in other words a systematic method of reconciling the romantic and organic orientation of Baxter’s early formation with the late modern milieu.
           ‘[P]assionate belief’ has it right, then. And one thinks immediately of the more elaborate and idiosyncratic constructions of Robert Graves and William Butler Yeats — Baxter was mercifully spared their near-fundamentalist mythologies by Jung’s psychological focus, his own temperament, and the Holy Spirit. In this respect it is unfortunate that the identification of that basic ‘problem’ does not lead to fuller consideration of why — as I think it can be — Baxter’s myth-eaten recourse to ‘structures of meaning’ is a problem. More generally, the comprehensive detail of this project — pitched largely as descriptive and contextualising — asks to be followed up by fuller consideration of the relationship of Baxter’s modern catholicising myth-habit, his Catholic faith, and his poetry. If, as Millar suggests, ‘Baxter’s own myth-making […] embodies the Blakean principle, ‘I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s’ (66), then in what ways did such systematics distort his poetry, not least in the conflict it implies between prevenient Grace and the epistemic immanence of constructivism. To put it another way, if the anthropocentric constructs of myth are glossed religiously as ‘the discovery of a sacred pattern in natural events’ (as Baxter seems to do in ‘Notes on the Education of a New Zealand Poet’), where does that leave the sacramental imagination? Recall ‘The Ikons’:

                                                 the darkness I call God,

The darkness I call Te Whaea, how can they translate
The blue calm evening sky that a plane tunnels through

Like a little wasp, or the bucket in my hand,
Into something else?

In light of Baxter’s life-long mythic habit of mind, could it be that in this poem Baxter arrives at the nadir T.S. Eliot did in ‘Ash Wednesday’: ‘consequently I rejoice having to construct something / Upon which to rejoice’?
            There is, too, the fact that Baxter — wilfully and unconcernedly, or so it seems, at least — syncretised Jungian psychology and Maoritanga with Catholic theology, in keeping with his habitual appropriation of useful existential and metaphysical tropes and tricks. And then, as our authors are keen to point out, the allusions to classical myth do not entirelydry up when Baxter heads north to Hiruharama (although here, too, a more satisfactory explanation than the one given is needed).
Whatever the case, in this accomplished collaboration Miles, Davidson and Millar — all established authorities on Baxter and myth — have pooled their enthusiasm and scholarly exactitude to produce a compelling argument for the centrality of classical myth to Baxter’s development, poetics and poetry, and have laid down a comprehensive foundation for further work.

JOHN DENNISON is a literary scholar specialising in contemporary poetry and poetics. His PhD, from the University of St Andrews, is a study of the prose poetics of Irish poet Seamus Heaney; he previously studied English and Theology at the University of Otago, and English and Classics at Victoria University. He currently teaches at Victoria University of Wellington.

Laughter and the Libido

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Cy Mathews
Past Present, by Peter Dane (Hudson Cresset Publishing, 2005) 108 pp., $24.99; Sex Poems, by Peter Dane (Words that Work, 2007) 70 pp., $16.00; Undone, by Peter Dane (Words that Work, 2008) 81 pp., $16.50.

In these slim, small press publications, former Bay of Islands orchardist Peter Dane handles the comic more successfully than the profound. Unfortunately, much of his work is weakened through his persistent attempts at the latter. Born in Germany in 1921 to a German father and a Jewish mother, Dane fled to the UK as a political refugee in 1939; he was interned as an enemy alien in Australia in the 1940s, and eventually settled in New Zealand in 1961, where he taught in the English Department at the University of Auckland, retiring as a Professor of English.
          He was involved with and influenced by Curnow, Mason and Baxter — in 1981, in fact, Dane generously donated a small collection of Baxter manuscripts and photographs to the Auckland Public Library. Past Present, Sex Poems and Undone all draw upon Dane’s personal history, but each differs in its emphasis. Sex Poems is, without a doubt, the most entertaining of the three. With its luridly blurry cover illustration of three naked people fondling one another in a Edenic environment, the book seems more likely to stimulate laughter than libidos. ‘I love to travel on the porno trail’ is a wonderfully bad first line, as is the description of the inhabitants of Sodom as being ‘dead keen / to gangbang the divine.’ Sometimes the humour avoids absurdity and sounds a wry note, as in the spurned lover’s complaint that begins ‘Eager and Open’: ‘You always do just what you want. / Sadly last night it was not me.’ The remainder of the poem, alas, doesn’t hit quite the same level.
Undone aims for a more serious tone. Here Dane tackles issues of ‘human stupidity and brutality,’ making, as the blurb puts it ‘an impassioned plea for sanity.’ The most readable piece in the collection is the long poem ‘Security,’ which tells the bleak story of a post-apocalyptic future in which a group of wealthy survivors and their servants shelter in a Waipiro Bay gated community, eating each other one by one when their supplies run out. Despite the blood-splattered nature of the story, there is a general lack of descriptive colour and detail: Dane tells his readers what is happening, but he doesn’t make us see it. Most of us are well aware of the stupidity and brutality at large in the world; Undone adds little to this awareness.
          Past Present is a more generalised collection. It is here that Dane’s personal life rises to the fore, with poems like ‘1940’ and ‘Interned 1941 Hay, Australia In Camp Near Waggawagga’ firmly grounded in autobiography. As in his other two books, Dane has a fondness here for the sonnet form. The rhymes are sometimes strained — for example ‘quietly’ with ‘fruit for me’ – and rhyming ‘heard’ with ‘unheard’ seems a dubious tactic. Again, most of the poems state their case too bluntly: ‘Begin Again,’ for example, informs us that:

We came so close
that you wanted to marry me,
desperately wanted to marry me.
Initially
we did agree I was not free,
committed to her whom I wed
many years ago.

Interesting, I’m sure, to Dane and the people referenced in the poem; it seems unlikely, however, that anybody else will be drawn in very far. The musical impulse the lines conjure up, as if to suggest some piano-thumping ballad, is unresolved — one senses that as a lyricist Dane has not quite found the tone he is striving for: amid all the rollicking it hovers elusively, like the faintest echo of some Weimar cabaret.

CY MATHEWS tutors in the English Department at the University of Otago.