Reid's Reader – A Blog of Book Reviews and Comment.

Welcome to REID’S READER, a site renewed fortnightly and devoted to the appreciation and discussion of books old and new by bibliophile, critic and reviewer Nicholas Reid. Each week REID’S READER offers Something New, Something Old and Something Thoughtful to readers and browsers. REID’S READER will sometimes feature guest reviewers and will sometimes offer general book news, but it does not run publishers’ publicity material. We would be grateful for any donation you can make by way of Paypal.

Monday, June 8, 2026

Something New

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

`“MINDING HIS OWN POETRY COMPOSING BUSINESS – A Biography of Peter Olds” by Roger Hickin ( Cold Hub Press, $NZ42:50)

Roger Hickin is much to be applauded for his interest in New Zealand writers and poets who have too often been ignored. In 2020 and 2022 he gave us A Roderick Finlayson Reader and Roderick Finlayson – A Man From Another World [both of which were reviewed on this blog]. Now he turns to the poet Peter Olds (born 1944 – died 2023 ) who was finally regarded by some as “the Laureate of the Marginalised”. Once again, Hickin is very thorough in his research. He has read all of Olds’ poems, read the letters and diaries Olds had written, interviewed as many people as possible who knew Olds, and got in touch with the publishers who distributed Olds’ work. A bonus is the photos [not too many of them] of Olds and some of those who knew him. Before I go too far however, I have to admit that Olds never was one of my favourite New Zealand poets. To put in simply, I found much of his work to be simplistic, sometimes self-pity, and sometimes angry without a cause. But then even I have to admit that he did write at least some good poems so who am I to be condemning him?

Some history. Peter Olds came from a Methodist family. His father was a Methodist lay preacher. The family moved from one place to another. At first they lived in Christchurch. Later they moved to Milton. Young Peter hated going to school and it seems he might have had dyslexia. When the family moved to Dunedin, he began to do well at school – and over the years Dunedin tended to be the place he liked most. The family moved to Auckland and Peter had to go to Seddon Tech. in the city. Again he hated the place as in those days (the 1950’s) there was much fighting and thuggery among the schoolboys. When he left school he picked up some jobs, but he became a sort of “bodgey” as was then the term. He spent a week in jail for stealing a car. At about the same time, he found his first real girlfriend who called herself Cathy… and ironically, years later when he was in his sixties, he ran into her again and thought she [now calling herself Katy] would be his permanent girlfriend, but it didn’t last. In his life he went though many women but never settled down with any of them. Back in Dunedin he stole another car. But he was growing up a bit. By the early sixties he was influenced by the Rolling Stones and read Kerouac’s On The Road and dug the Beat Poets.

The first real poet he met was young Hilary Baxter, daughter of James K. Baxter. He was greatly influenced by the poetry of Baxter and Dylan Thomas. So now in his early twenties he wrote his first real poem The Road Is Getting Bumpty. He was also able to write a short play called Loose Boards and Seagulls which was produced at Patric Carey’s Globe Theatre in Dunedin. But he was hampered by his life-long depression and when he tried to write a second play he could not finish it. He needed a psychologist’s help and spent some time in Cherry Farm. But at the same time he proved to be a very good draftsman when it came to drawing and creating images to promote plays for the Globe. He saw James K. Baxter as his guru, so when he moved to Auckland, where he was to be helped by another psychiatrist, he at the same time dossed at Boyle Crescent where Baxter held court with young people. The address was sometimes raided by police looking for illicit drugs He took to cannabis and other drugs for a while and became a Christian… sort of. But he was on probation for a while and he wrote a poem called On Probation which ran “I, their shiftless longhaired masterpiece / edge toward the courthouse / to face the animal of nightmares. / Eyes, handcuffs and tons / of incriminating files follow our man / who fears even / to pause to light a cigarette / in the light of a dumb lamppost…” All of which may be a little too grandiose for a young poet.

The influence of his Methodist father was long gone. By this stage he had a long affair with a girl called Janice Sturm, commonly known as “Yancy”. He followed Baxter to the Jerusalem commune with his girlfriend where other lost souls went but gradually he became disenchanted with Baxter. He rememberd Yancy would be lying “on a mattress on the floor reading romance books, smoking and sucking on bottles of Phensedyl” while he sat at his desk “bashing on my newly acquired second-hand typewriter – a poem, probably about cats, or our mad relationship, psychiatric hospitals and pills.” “Crap! ” was her verdict to everything he wrote. He regarded her as his “greatest critic.”

By now he was depending on Valium and sometimes Mandrax to keep himself going. Then came the death of Baxter, about whom he wrote in detail. He went to the tangi and wrote this poem: “I walked slowly up the brown dry / track to your grave & held it / high over your head, and someone in red hair / & weeping jeans ran from the bushes, screaming / “He’s caught Hemi’s cock”. You should / have seen the size of it, mate… / We ate well that night, listening / to the ducks fly over the flat green water.”

When he broke off with “Yancy” his next girlfriend was Lorene. And all the while he had to find jobs to keep himself alive. He remembered the biting cold weather in the Dunedin winter and he wrote “snoring through grey-sleet storms - / storms that drive the beaten / to bottle and pool-table bar / to lean on the shoulder / of a black-haired girl…”… and then Lorene was gone and his next girlfriend was Lynn with whom he said he had blown “all the seriousness out of me & put me on the track of Lady Lust…”

He kept on writing, and in psychological matters he was greatly helped by Dr. Maureen Bell. It was at that time that he wrote poems about his condition, writing “Tonight , walking home / hunched and greasy from chips and beer, / old dreams rose and grumbled behind me. / I ran the last block in fear. / Pausing on the steps near home / I saw the victorious moon rise beyond / dark North East Valley: / The sky clear, cool and pale / Earth black from long afternoon rains.” This at first sounds like a man who is confident… but the poem goes on to tell us that “In my room , I wade through rubbish / three feet deep looking for a pen and paper.”

Some friends rallied to him, including Hone Tuwhare with whom he enjoyed fishing. Hone Tuwhare helped Olds get a Burns Fellowship which helped him to write poetry without being distracted over some months. And he had a new girlfriend, Elizabeth Webb, though their relationship lasted only one year. He took a job as a cleaner at the University Bookshop of which he wrote “I work nights at the University Bookshop: / Junior, Intermediate, Headman, Honorary Caretaker, / Master Cleaner. I work in every conceivable position / from toilets, Foreign Language to Herbal Cookery, / sometimes singing ‘Oh What a Beautiful Evening’ and / sometimes not. Mostly, just a race about like / Neal Cassady with an overstuffed vacuum / cleaner snarling on my tail….”

I have to give him points for being upset by the destruction of the Clutha Valley when the Clutha Dam was being built. He wrote almost like Wordsworth in his thoughts on the valley and its greenery. Every so often, he went back to his parents, dried-out and set drugs aside… but then he would go back to booze and pills. Out of curiosity he went back to what used to be Baxter’s Jerusalem, now tidied-up and with the hippies gone, about which he wrote a poem. “Much cleaner than I remembered it in 1970. A long time since the / drug squads and hygiene officers that once came poking around: / Mr Baxter sedated, the grass clipped neatly around his balls, old scars / healed over, the prickly path edges chopped back, the barefoot / tracks trimmed into lovely English-garden curves, bones and secrets / raked up never to be mentioned again…”

By 1986 it was two years since he needed medication. He settled near to Seacliff and for a while he lived in a hut which he had improved. This was near to what was once a psychiatric hospital but was now empty. By 1990 he was back on the booze. For a while he helped Bryan Harold and Michael O’Leary run a second-hand book shop in Dunedin. He had some operations on one eye, and for some years he wrote no poems. What he called “after a long illness” he started to write again, often turning to ideas that he had considered in notes years before. In publication he was now helped by Michael O’Leary who ran his own work shop. Olds was very bucked up when David Eggleton wrote a positive review of his poems in the Listener. Eggleton said that Olds was “a poet of delicate perceptions robustly expressed” and called him a “laureate of the marginalised”. Olds hoped that he could have published a collection of all his works, but the small publishers were collapsing and there never was a collection of all his works.

He wrote a poem about fishing reminding him of the death of Hone Tuwhare which reads in part “You need the agility of a spear-throwing warrior / the feet of a high-jumper / and the deft hand of a pool-player. / You need to run head first / fearless into the frothing surf, and / in an instant of non-thinking, cast your line…” He was also able to write a good poem about Baxter for all his sins saying “Who but a madman would kneel barefoot on a hard pavement / in the centre of the busiest business district in the land / and pray for money and friends a rosary dangling over his genitals…” And finally he was glad that his collection Under the Dundas Street Bridge was published. But towards the end his poems had a sense of despair as in his poem saying “God’s not real. / Purpose is not real. / Meaning is meaningless. / Life itself is unreal / ( on shaky ground) / I miss love (Do you have to be born / with it? – is it a talent?) / Art’s bullshit – neurotic! / - refined obsession.” But he had some unexpected admirers. After moving to Dunedin, Vincent O’Sullivan “admitted to having held a rather disdainful and incomplete view of Peter’s early ‘beat’ work [and ] enjoyed his occassion encounters with Peter, and found the poems in [the collection] You fit the description.”

Knowing that he was getting old, Peter Olds wrote “Most days now / I don’t feel like going out . / I’d rather just sit here / fixing old poems, / looking out the window / for inspiration / at the cloud and mist / drizzling down from the north. / I drag out the dregs / I couldn’t throw away / feeling there’s something there / I haven’t spotted yet, / waiting for the time when / my eye will be clearer / and less fogged by thoughts / of fame and failure.” For a very short time he got back to his first girlfriend [Kate] but it didn’t work out. By now he was an old man. He had a number of strokes and he was now often seen in a wheel-chair. He died at the age of 79.

Inevitably in reviewing this biography I have given you only a part of Peter Olds whole life and only a very few of his poems have been quoted. It is interesting that he was very unsure about reading his poems to an audience. He particularly did not like having poetry being mixed with music. On this I agree with him.

Foot note: Michael O’Leary, who published many of Olds poems, is my wife’s cousin. Bryan Harold, who worked in the same second-hand book shop in Dunedin, moved to Auckland and set up a second-hand book shop in Ponsonby, to which I often went to fill my shelves. But it closed up some years back. Pity.

Somthing Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.

“LES TENEBRES” by Georges Bernanos (first published in 1928). Published in English in 1948 under the name Joy, which was the name that Bernanos originally thought should be the name

The French title of this novel, Les Tenebres, means The Darkness which forbodes something unpleasant or what is not clear. Why then was the English translation called Joy? Let me say the obvious. This novel is one of the most difficult novels I have ever read. It is written mainly as either conversations between two earnest people, or written in terms of the ideas that are going in the head of one character. Sometimes what they say or think can be almost cryptic. What is darkness? What is joy? Ideas can lead us either way.

The setting is a wealthy mansion in Normandy, but it is falling to shabbiness. The father of the house is Monsieur de Clergerie who is an historian or at least fancies himself as one. His wife Louise has died and he is thinking of getting married again. His mother is a very old woman, mainly bed-ridden and often called Mama or “Granny”. His daughter Chantal has been taught in a convent. Monsieur de Clergerie wants her to organise things until he is married again. The family is of course Catholic and the priest who often visits them is Abbe Cenabre, but Monsieur de Clergerie also converses with the family’s doctor La Perouse who is sceptic and puts his faith in science... and basically Monsieur de Clergerie goes the same way. In many ways it is a very unhappy family, their lives not fulfilled, and there is a large dramatis personae downstairs – Fernande the cook, a formidable woman; the unreliable maid Francine; and more fearful is Francois Fiodor who is Russian. He has escaped from the wars in Russia [for the record many “White Russians” headed for France when the Bolsheviks took over]. Fiodor does many odd jobs, but he also acts as chauffeur for Chantal - and he seems to have an unhealthy eye for her.

The focus of the novel is on the intellectual duels between Chantal, her father Monsieur de Clergerie, Abbe Cenabre and sometimes La Perouse. While Chantal is likely to be well off, she is often unhappy and sometimes she is tired and sick. She always remembers the wisdom she had learned from old Father Chevance when she was at the convent. Father Chevance always preached the need for charity. The old priest is now dead. Her father sees the ideas of Chevance as outdated, the thoughts of a foolish old man and unreal. So father and daughter debate. Says the narrative “ When Monsieur de Clergerie had insisted on his daughter’s taking charge of his household as soon as she left the convent, he did not realize what a weight such a responsibility was on such shoulders, nor that the daily supervision of six or seven servants, collected from the Devil where knew, and discharged as casually, was a rude and perilous school for a seventeen-year-old girl who would never be altogether the dupe of her own candour, more often hurt by what she guessed than by what she saw. But she had protected herself in her own way by a miraculous goodness, quietly and without any visible effort that can attract attention or inspire either praise or blame…” And later when Chantal looks over her lot, she is “Too sensible to indulge in vain regret that would only tighten her bonds, she only longed to take up her daily tasks again, the exercise of her household duties –simple, categorical, authentic - and, mortified, to re-enter that the universal asylum and only refuge for saints and sinners, a disciplined life, where she looked to find peace, like a lamb lost in a storm…”

While her father believes in science he has taken in many crank ideas. At one point he tells his daughter that human beings will soon be able to live for ever. Chantal trumps him by saying says to him “Heavens, I should be happy to be old! I should love to be an old woman with spectacles and a stick, quite, close to the cemetery and the little grave, knitting a woollen stocking with a wicked twinkle in her eye.” The fact is that she love life, not speculations about life. Her father wants her to either marry or go into a convent, neither of which she wants to do; and he keeps thinking about the woman he hopes to marry, a rich baroness. Chantal, though she is thoughtful and devout, is not sure of the advice given by the family’s priest Abbe Cenabre. She can think for herself.

So she goes walking around the estate, looking at nature, and she thinks about how she could do better in her relationship with her father while still keeping her integrity. For a brief moment she thinks of running away…. At which very point her Grandmother bursts through the bushes and runs into Chantal. Granny was supposed to have been looked after by the unreliable maid Francine who should have been giving Granny her daily walk in a wheel- chair. Chantal calms Granny, though she does think it is a bit of a chore. The old woman is not really thankful for Chantal’s help. Instead she talks about how the estate has been gone to the dogs over the years and she is still angry about the death of Chantal’s mother. Yet, chore though it was, Chantal has an odd feeling of joy in looking after her grandmother, even if she is a crotchety, grumbling old woman. She has a purpose in life. To her Grandmother , she says “Don’t be afraid… now I am strong enough to carry you. I wish you were heavy, much heavier, as heavy as all the sins in the world. You see, I have just discovered something I have never known: we can no more escape from one another than we can escape from God. We have something in common, and that is sin.” Once again, Bernanos is telling us that the human species is very flawed in what Christians call Original Sin.

Meanwhile downstairs the “help” are quarrelling and speculating about the family. The formidable cook Fernande is worried that Fiodor is somehow corrupting the unreliable maid Francine. Fiodor shouts back. In fact he says that everything is in a mess in this mansion and things will only be better when Chantal is in charge… though it is clear that he wants to be partly in charge himself.

And that is the first part of the novel.

Part Two begins with Chantal’s father being unsure that he really wants to marry again and he still has ideas for Chantal which she does not want. Monsieur de Clergerie is, however less sure about his own beliefs. ‘His Entire work with its costly and deceptive bibliographic arsenal, his table, his outlines, his statistics, had probably all had their source in the ruminations of a timid and dreamy adolescent, incapable of overcoming the terrors, desires and disgusts of puberty…” Perhaps his daughter was right. At last Monsieur de Clergerie comes to understand what sort of a man he himself really is. The doctor and sceptic La Perouse tells him about the way young women behave... or at least that is what he thinks he knows.

La Perouse has a long conversation with the Russian Fiodor. It is obvious that Fiodor wants to influence Chantal. La Perouse tells him that he is a fool and he will probably commit suicide when his grandiose ideas come to nothing. At which point Granny rushes about saying that “a girl” had hurt her and slapped her around the face. She is referring to Chantal. Chantal is able to explain that she had to slap the old lady when she had become hysterical and she had calmed her down. Granny still thinks that she is in charge of the house and she has kept keys which she thinks make her the owner of the house. Chantal is able to persuade Granny to hand the keys over to her and she puts Granny peacefully to bed. By this stage even her father understands that Chantal is the best keeper of the house. There follows a long conversation between Chantal and La Perouse about how she should have dealt with the old lady. La Perouse introduces many ideas coming from Freud. Chantal deals with charity and real situations.

Yet in all this Chantal understands that Fear is worse than Death, for she has gone through a time of real fear and has been unsure about her beliefs. Fear wears you down and makes you too ready to give in to foolish ideas and destructive ideas simply because they are popular. She understands that one has to take risks, seeing the best in people and being aware of those who do not mean well. She is not naïve. When she talks with the house priest Abbe Cenabre she is aware that he is only half interested in his work, even almost half-way to being sceptical when he speaks of religion. The family now think matters in the house are now in order. But there is no happy ending in this novel. Crazy Fiodor kills Chantal before he commits suicide.

So, you immediately may ask, how is there Joy in this novel? And here you have to think carefully. The family too often think of Joy in terms of hedonistic good times and a life of ease. But in her own terms, Chantal sees Joy as keeping her integrity, keeping her beliefs and not destroyed the lives of other people. This is true joy.

*. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *. *.

Forgive me for making a rather crude comment that I sometimes feel like saying when I read some French literature. This does not mean all French novels, but it does apply to some French novels. Often intellectual French novelists like to have long discourses about ideas and philosophy in the midst of a narrative. This, I think, is true of Les Tenebres / Joy.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

TAKING AN ACCOUNT OF “REID’S READER”.

Reid’s Reader began in 2011 and it has continued to 2026. I intend to keep it going. At first I posted my reviews and comments every week with the same headings Something New [meaning new books]; Something Old [classic and / or recent books]; and Something Thoughtful [which means anything I want to write about – movies, politics, history, annoying things etc. etc.]. However after some years I realised that this was too difficult a schedule to keep up with. So now I post my reviews and comments every fortnight and even then I have to absent myself when I go overseas for a holiday; and I always give myself a break between Christmas and the beginning of January. What this means is that I have reviewed and commented on [literally] hundreds of books.

Over these years I have got to know what the most interested readers of Reid’s Reader are. They are of course mainly New Zealanders. New Zealand’s poets read my reviews of their work, with about 100 readers – and sometimes more than that - each time their poetry is reviewed. But when it comes to novels, biographies and history, far more readers read than a mere 100 readers. In fact usually they reach over 1,000, and this includes novels written in the Eighteenth Century, Nineteenth Century and Twentieth Century. I am well aware that many students read my reviews as “cribs” for novels which they are supposed to be studying. The works of Balzac, F.Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, William Golding, five works of Charles Dickens, much of H. G. Wells and many others have been reviewed on this blog. These novels and others always attract more than 1,000. I quote Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour [1,375] ; Henry David Thoreau’s Walden [1,400 ] ; Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit [1,192 ] ; William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Newcomes [1,233 ] ; Balzac’s “Le Pere Goriot” [1,574] ; Raymond Radiguet’s “Le Diable au Corps” [1,941]; Jose Eustasio Rivera’s “The Vortex” [1,771] ; Graham Green’s “Journey Without Maps”; John Keats’s “Isabella or the Pot of Basil” [1,148] and many, many, others. Most important novels break the 1,000 ribbon… but there are also those who go further … and the winners are Angela Wanhalla’s “Matters of the Heart” [3,249]; and Victor Hugo’s “The Laughing Man” [3,776]; and above all there is the story of Kaspar Houser [21,908]. You can read all of these in Reid’s Reader. You will find all these by looking up the names of poets , novelists and historians. The books I have mentioned are small part of what there is in Reid’s Reader. And for the record I must note that many of my readers come from America, Australia and Britain as well as New Zealanders.

Monday, May 25, 2026

Something New

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“THE CALLING” by NIKI HARRE ( Auckland University Press $NZ35:00)

Niki Harre is a professor of psychology at the University of Auckland. She is an atheist and was raised as such. In 2021 she undertook a project to see what it would be like to be a secular priest. This term might puzzle, as for some people the very word “priest” could immediately sound like “church” ; but Harre notes correctly that the term “priest” has been used for thousands of years in many cultures. Harre uses the term “secular” to mean the everyday world (though interestingly, in the Catholic church a “secular priest” means a priest who works in a church in contrast with a bishop or pope, who are also priests.) Harre also notes in her preface that only 32 per cent of New Zealanders now define themselves as Christians [according to the census]. So at first she hopes to become a secular priest who will be able to replace “faith, hope and charity” [and “poverty, celibacy and obedience”] with “simplicity, hospitality and pause” [which I take to mean meditating or thinking carefully before you act]. As a secular priest she hopes to gather people in community and preach or discuss how people could live better lives, be more thoughtful, help others and deal with sorrow… but without religion. She also notes that many atheists like Ailain de Botton are too ready to lecture people, missing the point of community.

So she aims to be a priest without religion. But she also says [ Page xii ] “The peeling of religion, we secular-only type have lost access to religious ministers whose job is to help us navigates life’s difficulties and contribute, as best we can, to the common good. The daily, difficult task of living well together – a collective project that we all contribute to whether we like it or not - is somehow ignored or considered a ‘problem’ relegated to managers or consultants. And this, I think, has allowed us to drift into the vague sense of entitlement and aloneness that taints modern life. Despite our age of plenty, something is missing – as if we are not firing on all cylinders or dealing with the issues we face head-on. so in 2021 I set out to understand what we lost when we lost religion, and if any of it could, and should, be retrieved.” And on Pg.2 she admits that in being a priest as an atheist “I now suspect that the absence of God poses a serious challenge to the secular enterprise…”

So finally – with the permission of the Auckland Anglican cathedral - she has her first service down-stairs. She gives a sermon based on Karen Armstrong who at first aimed to be a nun but who broke from that and wrote about the need for caring people, understanding their problems, helping them and [p64] “she advocates for developing habits, both individually and collective, then turn us toward the other. The golden rule is her touch stone: treat others as you would like to be treated. This involves understanding yourself – what is it that brings me pain”…. So Niki Harre begins her teaching as a secular priest. She goes on Good Friday to the Anglican Cathedral interested in the ceremony and she lights a candle but she says it is not for God but for those in need. And so, bit by bit, she gathers a small community over the year… but is remains very small. There is some singing, the songs mainly secular ones but sometimes there is what were originally Christian songs; and being a feminist, if a song says “He” she changes it to “She”. But there always seems to be something missing. What is it? Perhaps it is ceremony. A talk and some songs and some discussion is all very well, but there seems to be little gravitas. She says she did well in presiding a “naming ceremony” – in other words a sort of baptism without the baptism. Sometimes she thinks it is hard to really get around the concept of God. And sometimes she finds that her audiences sometimes have different views and are not exactly in harmony.

Harre does have considerable compassion and is willing to hear and discuss many different points of view. In the mid of her project she is hit by something within the university where she works. Of the university she says [pp.139] “…the similarities between the Christian church and modern universities are striking. And, as I became friends with priests and other people of faith , it sometimes seemed as if we were separated only by an accident of birth. They were born into a community that talked of God and I was not. Perhaps if I had been raised Christian I would now talk of God too. I might even be a real priest (probably taking time away from my parish to do a PhD).” But something hits the university. Seven professors wrote a letter, published in the Listener, saying of the Maori language immersion programme that matauranga [ Maori knowledge] was not real science… and within the university, there was a verbal fire storm. Harre says there was little consideration of what had really been said. Instead, within the university people took sides, usually showing no real thought about what had been said. She spends many pages on this and it made her try to understand what each group had to say, but many most wanted to shout others down. This was a case of little empathy, little reasoning, and a loss of community…. And, unrelated to what happened in the university, in her work as a secular priest she saw in her small community that not everyone was of the same opinion. One woman said too many people were being excluded when it came to having discussions; and some were concerned that everybody became political. In spite of everything, there was still deep down a longing for ritual and community.

In the end, she admits that she would never try he “project” again. She says [Pgs.247-248] “In retrospect, the tragic flaw of my priestly aspiration was that I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. I wanted to walk though the wardrobe but never drop my identity as an atheist and materialist. I wanted to use ritual that made sense in the contemporary secular context but for that ritual to resonate with the depth that can only come from centuries of passing through human institutions. I wanted to offer consolation and guidance akin to that offered by religion, without the support and restraint of an organisation that makes religion possible. And because I was playing a game without all the cards in my hand, I only had moments of feeling a priest…”

Just some personal comments. Although she is an atheist, Niki Harre never ridicules or talks down to Christians. Far from it. Many of the texts she examines and applauds are Christian ones; and the desire for ceremony and gravitas are very much in her mind. Although she never uses the term, it is clear that “the God-shaped-hole” is still with us. There is a yearning for some power greater than we mere human beings. I must also add that, though only 32 per cent of New Zealanders now define themselves as Christians, this does not mean that the rest of the country are fervent atheists. Rather they are indifferent or uninterested, but perhaps with a vague nostalgia for the beliefs that their grandmothers and grandfathers had. Finally, I can’t help wondering whether some hard-core atheists will be annoyed that Niki Harre has been so positive about people with faith. Altogether, I think she has worked hard in her project and tried hard to put together a community. But in the end she could not be a priest.

Something Old

NOUVELLE HISTOIRE DE MOUCHETTE by Georges Bernanos (first published in 1937). Published in English in 1966 by J. C. Whitehouse. The French title means New Story of Mouchette, but the English version simply calls it Mouchette.

When I decide to review on this blog all the works of a novelist, I sometimes like to work methodically beginning with the novelist’s first novel and working my way to the novelist’s last novel. Thus I have done when I have written about George Orwell and F. Scott Fitzgerald and others. But with Georges Bernanos’s Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette I make an exception. There is a reason for this. In his first novel Sous le Soleil de Satan, published in 1926, he introduced a character called Mouchette, a young woman who was driven to suicide, by her own hedonism. After Bernanos wrote Sous le Soleil de Satan he wrote a number of novels into the 1930’s; but the idea of a character called Mouchette stayed in his head. What exactly could have made a woman despair and kill herself? Bernanos never assumes that only the wicked kill themselves. What had made her despair? So in 1936 he wrote Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette. But this is a very different Mouchette from the earlier one. She is a 14-year-old girl, and every so often there are sentences that suggest her world is in modern times. The earlier Mouchette was clearly set in the late 19^th century. The new Mouchette seems to be set somewhere in the 1920’s. Occasionally there are references to such things as movies, but they are very much in the background as [the new] Mouchette lives in a very rural place. And we soon understand that the 14-year-old girl’s life has been a very difficult one. Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette is short enough to be called a novella.

Mouchette’s parents are drunkards and her father is often violent. Their home is filthy and Mouchette’s clothes are tattered and/or grubby. She has to look after the baby because her mother is often too drunk to care. When Mouchette goes to school she is often mocked, not only by other girls [it is a girls school] but also by some of the teachers. She has a good singing voice but sometimes her voice breaks. The school-mistress tells her “You’re nothing but a savage… a proper savage. Even savages have their music – a savage one, of course, but still music…” So she runs away from school, but rather than going down the road where the other girls walk home, she tries to get home through the forest. And the wind blows up. And it rains furiously. And she gets lost. Her clogs become wet and she falls into mud. She decides to stay under a tree and sleep there for the night, fearing what her parents will say to her. Her father would probably beat her. But she meets an old poacher called Arsene who happens to be epileptic, as well is a heavy drinker like her parents. He guides her to his shelter in the forest.. Mouchette is shrewd enough to see what sort of a man he is and sees him like the men she knows in her small town. “For years Mouchette had felt herself a stranger amongst the villagers, dark and hairy just like goats, whom she hated so much. Even when they were young they ran to unhealthy fat. Their nerves were poisoned by the coffee they drank all day in their stinking cafes …” Arsene is sober enough to tell his life story, but his story becomes nastier when he boast about nearly killing a man. Again, Mouchette is mature enough to see what he is. She had heard drunkards talking before. Suddenly there is a shot heard in the forest. Arsene goes outside to see what has happened. There are two more shots. When he returns he suggests that he has killed Mathieu, a warden who fines poachers. He drinks more. He falls down and goes into a sort of fugue… and when he comes to he starts fiddling with Mouchette – trying to seduce her. It is clear that he rapes her. She escapes from him and manages to get back home.

Her parents are both in their usual drunken state. She has to do all the chores, including looking after the baby. The house – basically a hovel - is as filthy as ever. The narrator says of her position “Those are lucky in whom the first sexual experience arouses remorse or at least some emotion violent enough to overcome the formless anguish and desperate nausea which Mouchette felt. She made a pathetic effort to think about her banal adventure, but managed only to accelerate the procession of wild images that flowed throught her brain. It was like one of those endless nightmares of uniform horror which, as a real alcoholic’s daughter, she often had to endure throughout a whole night and whose full memory only really came back much later…” Used to being beaten and misused, she understands that being raped was just another event that women and girls had to go through, just like being beaten. Her mother is now very sick, on the verge of dying. Mouchette has to look after the baby more than ever, trying to feed the baby when there is no milk, when all the baby’s blankets are wet with urine, when the baby can’t stop crying. Her mother still calls for gin and howls and dies. She gets a little help from neighbours, but not much and sometime grouchily. In her mind she rebels. “The rebel beginning within her was a blind, dumb demon. Perhaps it did not deserve to be called a rebellion. It was rather an instantaneous, almost overwhelming feeling of her turning her back on the past and reaching the first decisive step towards her destiny.”

Because her mother has died, she is fed by some neighbours. She walks through the small town and meets Mathieu, the warden, and his wife. Mathieu laughs when Mouchette says he had been shot by Arsene. Had old Arsene shot twice only to let Mouchette think he was a great shooter and virile? [Or, as alert readers might think, was Arsene preparing to rape Mouchette?] But Mouchette insists that Arsene is her “lover”. What other word has the girl got to explain what goes on between women and aggressive men? Later an old woman helps to make a gown for Mouchette for when she goes to her mother’s funeral. The old woman at first speaks affably , but then she tells her own life story in detail. Mouchette listens but then she pushes the old lady away, not believing her stories and angered that she talk so much of death and the afterlife. After her experiences, she has come to the point where she does not have trust in anybody. Where can she go? She wants to be alone. She goes down to the river and thinks about dying. The last words of the novella read “Mouchette slid down the bank until she felt the gentle sting of the cold water on her leg and as far as the thigh. The sudden silence inside her seemed infinite, like the trapeze-artist reaches the top rung of the ladder. She will dissolved. She slid out into the water, pushing against the bank with one of her hands. She could hold herself up in the shallow water by the pressure of one hand on the bottom. Then she felt the insidious flow of the water along her head and neck, filling her ears with its joyful sound. She knew that life was slipping away from her, and the smell of the grave itself rose to her nostrils.”

How is this tale connected with the other Mouchette in Sous le Soleil de Satan? In that earlier novel, you might remember that Father Donissan did his best to get Mouchette buried in a decent way. Mouchette hated the Church and was destructively hedonistic, but nevertheless she had gone through many horrors that were not of her doing, and despair overtook her. In the new Mouchette, Bernanos gives us an even more extreme case. How can a fourteen-year-old girl survive when her parents don’t look after her, when she is often beaten, when she lives in filth, when alcohol rules the house, when she is ridiculed by other children and teachers and learns little at school and when she is raped? She is an alert and in her own way thoughtful, often seeing through other people’s negative behavior. But she has come to the point of trusting nobody – which leaves her on her own. She commits suicide. Once again, Bernanos shows us that we have no right to look down on people who have been through severe distress.

Footnote: Before I had read any of the works of Bernanos, I had seen two films based on Bernanos’s novels. One was his most famous novel The Diary of a Country Priest and the other was Mouchette. Both films were directed by Robert Bresson who had often in his films dealt with Catholic ideas. Please note this was not propaganda. Other French film-directors like Francois Truffaut saw Bresson as one of France’s greatest directors. I saw the film Mouchette when I was a teenager. The film was released in 1967. As I remember it, the film Mouchette seemed to be set in modern times, but its story followed the novel very closely. The young actress in the leading role was Nadine Nortier. If the film had a flaw, it was that the young girl playing the lead seemed reasonably dressed; rather than the grubby ragamuffin in the novel.

Nadine Nortier in the role of Mouchette

Something Thoughtful

WHY I AM NOT A PACIFIST

How many of you like war? Virtually none I would guess and neither do I. If we think back to very ancient days, we could think about men fighting with spears or sling-shots, or men on horses, or knights in armour, or arrows or even the early use of gunpowder and artillery. It almost seems romantic. But of course that is just daydreaming. Even in ancient times, soldiers were killed, slaughter covered the battle-grounds, survivors would be maimed and usually the battles had achieved little. And don’t forget how non-combatants would often also suffer. So we don’t like war. And of course we now have even more lethal weapons, from the First World War to the Second World War to the present day we have had gas, long-range artillery, bombing, nuclear weapons, drones and missiles that can pick out exact places and destroy them. Goodbye to towns, to cities, to homes.

So, like you, I do not like war. And over thousands of years, people have tried to find ways to stop wars. The ancient Greek and Roman philosophers tried [without much success] to put together codes that would limit wars. Jesus Christ said, in the sermon on the mount, “Blessed are the peace-makers”. Hindus and Buddhists and Jains claimed that war was abominable. Many of the so-called “Enlightenment” wrote about the evil of war. I regret to say that while Islam has always claimed to be “the Religion of Peace” it’s founder Mohammed was himself a warrior who waged wars; but at least some of his followers have tried to find ways of bringing peace. Over the years there have been many honourable people who have written against war. Tolstoy, the Quakers, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Simon Weil, Archibald Baxter. Recently the Pope has written about the need for peace – apparently annoying some Americans who think that their president knows better. And over the years there have been poets who had come to abhor war, especially poets who had been soldiers themselves – Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Edmund Blunden who ended up writing a book about the pointlessness of war…but wait a minute, that was in the First World War and it was a very different kettle of fish in the Second World War.

Which brings me to what I think are the flaws of Pacifism.

Isn’t it reasonable for a country to protect itself with force when it is likely to be invaded by a hostile country? In fact, wouldn’t it be reasonable for a country to have an army [or navy etc.] ready? I know that some countries put together large forces, claiming that they are just protecting themselves, when in fact they are simply getting ready to invade another country. This is a story as old as time. Empires were built on this pretence. Thus were built the Chinese, the Indian, the Egyptian, the Muslim, the British, the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Russian, the Zulu [and many other African countries] and as many other empires as you can think of. But even so, nations have the right to protect themselves.

And isn’t it obvious that fully pacifist peoples are the first to be destroyed? Look no further than New Zealand. The Moriori people of the Chatham islands were absolutely pacifist. In the 19^th century, they were wiped out by more war-like Maori. [Footnote: I am aware that many Maori iwi were not belligerent, and we should all know about Parihaka.]

And I must point out that pacifism easily fades away when a real war comes along. Item: In the 1920’s and 1930’s there was, in Europe, great disillusion with regard to war. The First World War had exhausted them. Cities and towns had been destroyed; millions of people had been killed; money had been wasted for no real reason; many maimed solders could be seen in the streets or were in hospitals because of “shell-shock”, and there were many novels written saying that war was an abomination [read All Quiet on the Western Front and keep reading]. In the 1930s Dick Sheppard put together the Peace Pledge, so that thousands of people in England signed on for his pledge, that we would never go to war again…and then along came the Spanish Civil War…and some pacifists changed their minds, and went off to fight Franco…and then Hitler invaded Poland and the country realised that they were now facing a real war. I must add that many pacifists realised that they had to fight against tyranny. Unfortunately, some pacifists took the easy way [like Aldous Huxley] and took off to the United States. The hard fact is that many pacifists are pacifists only when they are not facing a war that could kill them.

I trust that what I have said is not facetious. What I cling to is the Just War Theory. Before and after the Middle Ages, the theory was developed. The most influential two philosophers who wrote about war were Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. What they both essentially said was that war can only be used for defence. It was wrong for Kings and Emperors to go to war simply for personal glory. But it was legitimate for a country to defend a community and protect allies. Personally, I would add that violent uprisings in wars of liberation are legitimate.

So I go back to saying that I am not a Pacifist but this does not mean that I am a war monger. I would also have to point out that I have read many works by pacifists which I have found enlightening. They are very worth reading and I admire their idealism.

Monday, May 11, 2026

Somethiing New

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

THE INTERVIEW ROSE by Elizabeth Smither (Auckland University Press, $NZ 24.99); BLUE IS A CRACKED VASE IN MEMORY: POEMS 2000 – 2025 by Riemke Ensing (Cold Hub Press, $NZ33:00); THE GUM TREES OF KERIKERI by Lynn Jenner (Otago University Press, $NZ30); PEACE & QUIET by Dinah Hawken (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $NZ25)

It is an interesting fact that both Elizabeth Smither and Riemke Ensing, well known poets, are both now in their 80’s. But while their interests are very different, they are both still producing some of the best poems New Zealand has. I start with Elizabeth Smither.

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To call Elizabeth Smither erudite would be an understatement. As well as writing six novels and six collections of short-stories, she has produced 19 collections of poetry. The Interview Rose is her 20^th collection. Reading widely, Smither’s knowledge of literature is connected to the fact that she has worked as a part-time librarian. The title poem of this collection The Interview Rose has her facing “The week of interviews, twenty minutes each / to face a panel for my disappearing job…” But she is buoyed by the bright rose-coloured hat she is wearing. Next to this poem, there is The Interview Confession, concerning the problems of having to deal with “a difficult borrower” complaining about a book. Six of her poems deal with women in novels by Jane Austen, not always seeing them as honourable people. And then, as often, there comes her interest in Catholicism. Thus there are such poems as The Travelling Reliquary of St. Teresa of Avila , A Room of Madonnas, The Angel of Death, and In the Sacred Heart College Library (where girls are praying). But if this intimidates you, Smither does not at all preach. She is interested in the aesthetic side of religious ceremonies, the colour, the style.

More important than all this, Smither’s poetry is compassionate. There is no anger. There is no asking us to join a cause. Instead there is an acute way of telling us about how important everyday things are. Take the poem De-Stringing Beans, a poem about the homely thing of taking pleasure in stringing and slicing runner beans. Is this a small thing? But surely every-day things can be an achievement. And in the last poem of these 49 poems, there is Mark Doty: a footnote, about a well-known poet who showed that he could take as much pleasure in football as in poetry. Nothing snobbery there.

Compassion goes to animals and nature itself. Her opening poems in this collection has her considering a frog that is struggling, the death of a fish on the beach, and cows listening to music… and later daisies bearing up in the rain. But all is not tragedy. Elizabeth Smither is obviously an ailurophile as many poets have been [check your Baudelaire, T.S.Eliot etc.]. Thus we have her The Cat and the Wittgenstein Quotes, wherein we are given both an amusing tale and some hardy philosophy. Thus when the cat has “an hour in the sun and then a leap leaving / some words scrunched. Where of one / cannot speak, there of one must be silent. / Such simplicity to a cat who will not leap / onto a chair and then the carpet until / something better offers…” Ah! the fickleness of cats. And right next to it there is the poem 100 Brushes of a Cat, showing how wonderful and luxuriant the coating of a well-kept cat is. Be it noted too that the poem Degas and the Dancers shows Smither’s interest in movement itself.

But after I have noticed all these fine poems, there is one that stands out for me. This is Love at the Gare de Nord. I mentioned the thread of compassion that runs through Smither’s work, but this poem caps them. The poet sees a messy couple, dirty and shunned, sitting on the steps, annoying… but when she sees them embrace and kiss, she understands that they have the right to love and live too. Sentimental? Not at all. Read the poem and you will see what I mean.

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Riemke Ensing’s collection called Blue is a Cracked Vase in the Memory / Poems 2000 – 2025 is made up of four parts. The first three, called Storm Warning, O Lucky Man and If Only, were published in limited editions by a craft publisher and hence were not widely seen. They make up almost half of Poems 2000 – 2025. However the fourth part Blue is a Cracked Vase in the Memory takes up more than half of the collection, so we now have all Ensing’s more recent work.

Over the years, whenever I read the poetry of Riemke Ensing, I immediately have in my mind an image of her as a woman walking along a beach – any long beach in New Zealand, like Muriwai – and looking out to sea, enjoying the view but also seeing a sort of magic and reading much in the sea and the sky. Perhaps she is thinking about how far she is from the Netherlands whence she came when she was a girl. There is, in some of her poems, a thread of loss. But note there is also, in the very first poem in this collection, a sense that there is a greater force than nature to guide us. Says her poem Muriwai “Wind brushed / water washed / the sand / grained with signatures of gulls / temporary as moments / flicking their feet into the sky / waiting for gusts/…../ spirits wail and leave in the sand / a watermark. At the water’s edge / gods breath the lifted wave into song.” Naturally, as one who is interested in nature, she also writes about places other than beaches, as in her Waitakere River Valley, or in her poem Lament looking at Lake Kawaupaku. In full it reads “Hills hunker down and slide / into the belly of lake cradling sites / ancient as wings finding no resting / place in the remembered past. / Silver slips into clouds / shivering through water, / stroking out landscapes / buried in sorrow and loss.” And she is also enchanted by trees. Her Fourteen Ways of Looking at Pohutukawa is following Wallace Stevens’s Thirteen ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

By the way, it is fair to say that some of her shorter poems are as crisp and short as haiku, but they are not haiku. Much later, for example, there is After Loss which reads in full “Storm windows / are put up / for winter. / The light / mourns / then finds itself / in the moon / touching / the lamp.” Or later there is Top of the Morning reading in full “A dress of bright flowers / almost flies across the street. / An instantly uplifting poem / quickly disappearing into the bustle of day. / Carpe diem.”

But what of sorrow and loss? She has two poems sitting side-by side called War- Childhood and War-Biography which apparently could have to do with her childhood in the Netherlands… or any other child who had to go through a war. In a different sort of sorrow there is Pretending to be in Paris without You. And much better there is Birds, rain & plum, which opens with the stanza “ It is winter. Rain insinuates itself / in the damp corners of the house, / tries to get in covers of books / standing a little listless in the depressed grey / the sky has cast into the room” But the real sorrow comes in the next line which is “It is many years since your death….”

Ensing does not usually deal with protesting, but she does record one example of miscarriage of justice, in “Out of Dark” where she recalls the incarceration of Ahmed Zaoui; and in “A Piece of Glass” she joins the protesters against the building of yet another jail.

Having noted all that, two of Ensing’s greatest interests are painters and other poets. Very carefully, she writes poems about poets, from Baxter to Charles Brasch to Hone Tuwhare to many, many others; and from Tony Fomison and Don Binney and many, many other painters.

In writing all this, I have dealt with only a small part of Riemke Ensing’s Blue is a Cracked Vase in the Memory / Poems 2000 – 2025. I have read every poem, but if I were to examine in detail every poem, I would be filling many more pages.

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Lynn Jenner lives in the Far North of New Zealand, now an old woman, and she opens her 56 prose poems with these words: “The land I live on was a kauri forest for centuries; then in the late nineteenth century it was a kauri gumfield, then a mandarin orchard; part of a dairy farm in the 1950s, a tamarillo orchard in the 1970s, and a lavender farm in the 1980s: now it is a home for four people, lots of ornamental trees, a vegetable garden, two old plum trees, travellers from New Zealand and other countries….” Immediately she is reminding us that land changes and people use and re-use the earth in many ways. She is in no way chastising our ancestors for doing so. At the same time, she is very concerned about nature. In another poem she writes of a farmer who has moved to planting trees. He no longer herds sheep because wool now does not make a profit. In another poem she identifies with the trees where she writes “In spring the poplar trees in the Ness Road have soft new leaves; I stop walking and listen to them gossiping.” Surely every sensitive reader would respond in the same way. In yet another poem she sees leaves as fabric, thus: “Walking up through the Hongi Hika reserve from Kororipo Pa is peaceful and cool. Red and yellow gum leaves cover the path and I picture them as a fabric…”

But while her interest in nature is important, she has many other interests as well. In various poems… She takes part in a “Free Palestine” protest. When in a line where the police are doing their breath-tester, she wonders about that blood-red tattoo which one of the police has. She meditates over her great-grandfather who came to New Zealand from Poland in the 19^th century, and as a result his legacy was about 420 descendants. She is clear in her feminism and she pleasures as women do, saying “Standing on the grass in my tee-shirt, I am part of a long chain of women drawn to the moon. I bathe in the cools silver light, my skin pleasure and my night wonder.” Twice she writes poems about paintings by Colin McCahon, in each time given her of interpretations of his work. In this, one understands that she is an atheist, but she still has her beliefs. And she speaks of climate change when “ People talk about the degradation of the earth, but mostly they do not spell what they see coming so as not to scare the rest of us..” She hopes for peace, and looking at doves she says “And now, with the sun on my face, I think these six doves on the lawn in Kerikeri might be an omen of peace somewhere peace is needed. Sun and doves against monsters and tanks.” One always hopes. The Gum Trees of Kerikeri is a thoughtful collection, touching on many interests.

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Peace & Quiet readily shows us that Dinah Hawken can produce very persuasive images, showing us the glory of sea and general nature while at the same time warning us that evil might come our way. Take for example one of best poems “Trembling” which reads in full “A spring morning and you can see the wind / has no bravado. Over the island / a winged cloud moves towards you / out of a truly sweet blue. / Surrounded by gentleness, the swoop of a tui, / the repressed threat of a warming world. / From the sidelines a leafiness arises / and it trembles. It’s like standing / under the outdoor shower / with the sound of a piano paying upon / your stiff, wingless body.” Notice how we move from “truly sweet blue” to “the repressed threat of a warming world”.

Peace & Quiet is divided into three sections.

Brief Scenes comes first. It presents us with an island [perhaps meaning us] is being overwhelmed by the tide and the ocean, though it is still majestic. The poem The assessment asks “What if there is nothing wrong? / What if there is nothing wrong with you? / What if there is nothing wrong with me: / I’m not even too quiet, / too old, too forgetful? / Just old, quiet and forgetful.” Is there a sense of desperation here? Yet there are some things that are positive. The poem Each side says “Care for the children, he said, / care for them with both hands, / one each side of each small head, / their trusting and trustworthy eyes / looking up at you.” Perhaps humanity will continue as suggested. But there is hanging a sense of menace. What is it?

Next comes Speaking of Peace. Dinah Hawken is a pacifist and she writes in detail of a possible war. Part of the poem Solar says “Dark clouds wipe out / the highest peak of the island. / The wings of tyranny and downpour / hover over the global landscape…” Who could she possibly be thinking about? She quotes from Mozi (c. 470 – 391 BC) who said “To kill one man is to be guilty of a capital crime, to kill ten men is to increase the guilt ten-fold,… The rulers of the earth all recognise and yet when it comes to the greatest crime – waging war on another state – they praise it.” So in many poems she refers to Te Whiti and Parihaka and she quotes Simone Weil and Siegfried Sassoon and Archibald Baxter and Gandhi and Rebecca Solnit and other worthies who opposed war.

Finally comes Brief Scenes where the poem October morning tells us “We are a slip of a country in a vast ocean. / The laws of war were a safeguard. / A lighthouse and its light.” How fragile we really are when it comes not only to the polluting of the sea, but also to the fact that New Zealand is a small country and one that cannot really save itself from the aggreson of other greaer nations.

In her final (and longest) poem she says “… there is singing / birds and breeze and laughter: and / even though we have weapons / of mass destruction even though / we are filling the oceans with poisons and plastic / even though out long-held agreements are breaking up like sae ice / two hands play the cello and / can you believe it all is well: / still we welcome / each newborn child into this rare world…”

There is much idealism in these poems and much to be admired.