Parish Moments

Robert McLean
Cornelius & Co: Collected Working-class Verse 1996—2009, John O’Connor (Post Pressed, Queensland, Australia, 2010), 144 pp., $25.00.
John O’Connor is a Christchurch poet who has had eight books of poetry published. His most recent book is Cornelius & Co: Collected Working-class Verse 1996–2009, a sizable (144 pages) selection of previously published and new poems that are more or less in keeping with the qualification of the collection’s title.

Is there irony in its tub-thumping title? The distinction between verse — often skating close to doggerel and to which is usually appended the qualifier ‘light’ — and poetry — assumed to be a far more serious proposition — amounts to one between low-brow ‘popular’ entertainment and high-brow diversions of the intelligentsia: not a realistic or clearly delineated division, but the tension generated by that division provides much of the energy crackling in these poems.

Whilst the poems in this book are derived from O’Connor’s lived experience – as a boy growing up in an Irish-Catholic household and parish; as a resident of the suburb of Addington; and as a taxi driver encountering smudged, damaged, or yobbish ‘characters’ – the experiences are treated with forensic detachment. There is a fierce and committed intelligence invested in these poems, which offer sharply-drawn characterisations, compassionate detachment, keen humour – and an uncompromising adherence to highly theoretical principles of composition that sometimes clash with or spark off the intransigent events on which they have been brought to bear.

So these poems aren’t simple reflections of everyday life in a mirror of language held up to it by the poet. Yet focusing on particularities rather than abstractions is the sole means to make conspicuous the orders of the real. There is, no doubt, a perennial Curnovian ‘reality prior to the poem’ with which reader and writer must contend – but this isn’t a question of verifiability for either of them. We ought not to ‘seek/The poem of pure reality’, apart from the poem being real in and for itself. The constant tension between world and word, such a common local critical chime, sometimes to the point of banality, is, to my eye and ear, more relevant to reading Cornelius than is usually the case. These poems often reminded me of Oppen’s concern to get at things, and to the workers and makers of things, but more relevant to a sympathetic reading are the procedures of Russian Formalism, especially Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarisation (also translated as ‘estrangement’): one is compelled to make objects ‘unfamiliar’. Admitting that the working class is significant in itself to O’Connor – and the introduction makes this clear – the formalist in him nevertheless emphasises that the artfulness of an object is, in the end, what matters; the subject is important only to the extent it serves such artfulness, presenting things in a new and unfamiliar light by way of formalist manipulation.

This process of ‘making it strange’ is registered on several levels. Merely treating the working-class milieu and argot in a context such as O’Connor has made is itself unusual. Then there are experiments with typography: text is projected here and there, and hither and thither, about the page, and sometimes dingbats replace words (looking forward to formatting pages for publication, editors with electronic submission facilities must be very grateful to have them when poems such as these appear in their inboxes). As the sections and the overall sequence of poems move from early childhood through to schooldays and onto adulthood, so the pages move from fairly conventionally typeset lyrics towards ever more disjunctive, fragmentary, and disruptive layouts. It seems as if the most distant rememberings have been stabilised and integrated though imaginative reconstruction; while the closer one moves towards the historical present, the less potent this process of creative re-rendering becomes. Reported speech, the incidence of which also progressively increases as the collection unfolds, is delivered either in grimaced italics or in quotation marks acting as semantic forceps, by means of which readers may more easily inspect examples of half-truth (though there is more to this than at first appears). As the sequence becomes more distanced from an initial speaking voice that is wry and integrated and stable, so it becomes more prey to interruption by characters from without.

What is most working class about these poems is their diction — at least a large part of it is — and it is a diction both severe and unchaste. The working class – or their lexicons – do seem to play to type. At first the pseudo-reported speech appeared curt, facile, violent; but with further readings I felt pressure behind the hollowed words. Throwaway and clichéd stock-phrases are isolated on the page, either by white space or by dry interlocutions, and seem to beg for frustrated paraphrase, as they don’t serve the intensity of the scenarios in which they are uttered. O’Connor wants us to see that the difficult and complicated humanity of the speakers warrants more; that what’s said is telling in its inadequacy. Despite the Catholic mise-en-scene in section 1, redemption never comes. The absence of grace, too, is justified by the lack of good works. O’Connor, to his credit, refuses to indulge in poetic fiat to make available such allowances.

This awareness, though, does not countervail over the monotony that eventually sets in. O’Connor’s merits aren’t easily appreciable in the homogenising context of Cornelius & Co. Yet it is idiotic to demerit a book for not being another one. This book contains finely crafted poems, a few of which are outstanding. The most moving of these is ‘Never Say Die’, which is fine enough to be quoted in its entirety:

you’ve watched someone die perhaps

or try to die. at first

they wait, &

it does happen: the changes to

the body – the strengthening of the will.

evenings they talk

say what they

loved & what they now regret.

in the fading light

you listen to their breathing

halt sometimes for a long

moment & restart, they refuse food

take pain killers only

because you’re young & never say die.

you walk out into green

wishing that on your return they’ll

be still. just like that –

a phrase of birdsong, the click of an acorn’s fall.

The deferral of ‘be still’ to the penultimate line is masterful. Even the cliché of the ninth line manages to carry more weight than it ought to. This poem speaks as Emily Dickinson spoke, and into the same emptiness for which we are responsible and to which we must account. What is more estranging than death? What else makes everything and everyone so unfamiliar? Shklovsky and the working class of Addington would surely be likeminded in the end.

ROBERT McLEAN was born at Bethany in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1974. He graduated from the University of Canterbury in 2004 with an MA in political science and art theory, returning to complete an MFA in creative writing in 2008. His poems, translations and reviews have been published in a variety of periodicals and anthologies both locally and overseas. His first collection, For the Coalition Dead, was published by Kilmog Press in 2009; For Renato Curcio (Gumtree Press) followed in 2010.

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