Something New

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

“COLLECTED POEMS” by Fleur Adcock (Victoria University Press, $NZ50); “SELECTED POEMS” by Brian Turner (Victoria University Press, $NZ40)

            I’ve expressed this view before on this blog, but there’s no harm in repeating it: reviewing poetry can be a chore, not because the poetry is bad or unwelcome, but because it is hard to do justice to any collection of poetry. If each poem is worthy of the name, it demands a careful and thoughtful reading on its own, and it should bring forth from the reviewer a detailed exposition and critique. But, alas, reasons of space, and the patience of readers, make such an approach impossible. So the reviewer is left with a choice. First, there is what I would call the bibliographical approach (of which I admit I have often been guilty). The reviewer neatly checks off and name-checks as many poems as possible, says how often the poet does or does not use certain forms of imagery or versification, notes dominant themes of the poet (with examples) and then draws a conclusion. This can be good, factual reportage, but as reviewing it is often bloodless and sounds like the schoolroom. The alternative is the emotional approach. The reviewer swallows the collection of poetry whole, then makes a broad statement about what sort of poetry it is, and what emotional effect it has had. This can make for robust personal criticism – a statement about the poet’s successes and failure, perhaps - and can be lively in showing the reviewer’s engagement with the work. But just as often it can lead to vague, windy generalisations about the poet’s work  - the type of thing that often ends up being quoted in puffs for the poet’s later works.

            This reviewing problem is especially difficult when the two books under review are by familiar and well-established poets. Fleur Adcock’s Collected Poems and Brian Turner’s Selected Poems gather together work that has already been reviewed often. In each case we are now getting the retrospctive of a whole writing career. How can a review, which is itself less than book length, possibly deal fairly with this? I shudder, grit my teeth, and resign myself to my usual mixture of dry bibliography and (probably) windy generalisations.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

            I will take the more formidable example first. Fleur Adcock, now in her 86^th year, had been publishing poetry since the early 1960s and has garnered much applause and many literary prizes along the way. Over fourteen of her collections have appeared in more than half a century. A fine hardback tome with a reader’s ribbon, her Collected Poems run to over 550 large pages. I assume that she has chosen to omit some of her earliest poems as we get only poems “from” her first two collections The Eye of the Hurricane (1963) and Tigers (1967). Otherwise, we can reasonably assume we are getting all 54 years of her oeuvre, right up to her two most recent collections The LandBallot (2014) and Hoard (2017) both of which you can find reviewed elsewhere on this blog. To make an obvious point, Fleur Adcock is as much a British poet as a New Zealand one. Probably our most famous living literary expat, she has spent most of her life in England. Most of her collections have been published by either Oxford University Press or Bloodaxe Books.

            So much for reportage stuff. What about the poems?

            I spent a week reading – generally with great pleasure and admiration – these Collected Poems, and I can find no better way of accounting for them than by dealing with them decade by decade as the poet has matured and aged.

            In the 1960s (the collections The Eye of the Hurricane and Tigers), Fleur Adcock in her 30s is already the strong master of stanza form who makes judicious use of rhyme and shows she is fully conversant with both the great tradition of poetry and the Classics. One of her most constant themes is relationships with husbands or lovers, but she has a cool, pragmatic way of dealing with them. There are no romantic rhapsodies, but a dissection of emotional facts ex post facto. Children are addressed or mentioned, but in a way that is meant to nudge them into the real world, pushing against illusions and fantasies. This is already a poet fully formed.

            In the 1970s (the collections High Tide in the Garden, The Scenic Ride, The Inner Harbour and Below Loughrigg) Fleur Adcock in her 40s still deals with lovers – there are a number of poems addressed to “you”, being presumably somebody with whom she is in a relationship, and many poems have the “do you remember?” trope.  But she shows more assertiveness in dealing with male authority figures and imposed male images like the bogeyman. There are poems recalling her discontent, being a mother of two at the time and wanting to leave New Zealand. Then there is a major shift to specifically English scenes and talk of travels further afield (Northern Ireland, Asia etc.). Her poems explore the Lake District extensively and there are the beginnings of one of her most constant preoccupations – the search for ancestors. Poems such as “Going Back” and “Instead of an Interview” give her reactions to returning to New Zealand on a visit, but also her confirmation that England is now her real home. She still makes classical allusions and can use traditional stanza forms, but she is now more likely to use looser forms, moving towards free verse.

            In the 1980s (the collections Selected Poems, the ballad Hotspur, and The Incident Book), now approaching, and in, her 50s, Adcock displays a growing sense of the perspective given by age. Some poems do indeed refer to cuurrent affairs or relationships, and she does dissect the relationships of other people – but her personal confessionalism of such matters in mainly seen through the medium of memory. There’s now the arrival of grandchildren and more poems both about children and about her memories of being a child at school in England. There is a flowering of sometimes quite light-hearted wit, often deploying rhyming couplets for more jocular verse.

In the 1990s (the collections Time Zone and Looking Back) Adcock shows an increasing interest in British fauna (poems about toads, wrens, house-martins) and “the ploughed fields of Middle England” (in the poem “Turnip-heads”). She makes reconnections with New Zealand and Australia and parts of Europe. Settling into grandmotherly mode, she writes poems about friendship being more enduring than blazing love affairs and assiduously continues her interest in ancestors, mainly with 19^th century forebears but sometimes digging much further back. Many poems are first-person confessional (at their worst, like diary jotting or ghosts of Edgar Lee Masters).

In the 2000s (the collection New Poems and Dragon Talk – the latter dedicated to her recently-deceased nonagenarian mother) Adcock presents a long sequence of poems – “My First Twenty Years” - about her childhood and youth in New Zealand and England.  She gives us a familiar paradox here – the further away from childhood poets get, the more likely they are to dwell upon it. There are poems in which she consciously confronts age (a wry poem about getting used to computers). Increasingly there is the sense that, having paid her debt to urgent issues, she is now, “all passion spent”, lighting candles to the past. When she was younger, she struggled with husbands and lovers. Now she snuggles grandchildren.

Now, in the 2010s, the poet of Glass Wings (2013) is in her 80s and writes quite a few “in memoriam” poems about deceased contemporaries, as well as poems about the irony that some oldsters are still living. The ailments of old age are addressed in poems like “Nominal Aphasia”, “Walking Stick” and “Macular Degeneration”, and there are more poems [some heavily ironical] about specific ancestors. In this phase, we are far from the young sexual rebel. A selection of poems about insects often recalls childhood, but just as often adult encounters with wasps, fleas, bees, dragonflies, ants (and the “crabs”). Her two most recent collections are The Land Ballot and Hoard. The former is a reconstruction of her grandfather’s and father’s lives in trying to make a go of an unpromising farm in the King Country, together with some memories of the poet’s own earliest New Zealand childhood. The latter combines memories of childhood and early marriages; recalls to ancestors; poems of the English landscape and – more fully than anywhere else in her work – observations on what New Zealand is now, often in the form of evoking what it once used to be.

What has all my dutiful chronicling of the decades told you, apart from the fact that – like all of us – the poet has grown older?  Or that the perspective of a woman in her 80s is not that of a woman in her 30s? Yes, the things Fleur Adcock chooses to deal with have changed, but the poet has essentially remained the person she is – observant, unsentimental, witty, well-read, a little acidic and presenting her own view of the world

Inevitably, there will arise the question of whether Fleur Adcock is a “feminist poet”. Personally, I think it is wrong to pigeonhole a poet of such variety with such a limiting label. Adcock writes about many things. She is never a proselytiser or preacher for any cause or ideology. Nor is she primarily a political poet or satirist, though in The Incident Book there is a clutch of poems called “Thatcherland” and she has written a poem on the negative effects of insectidices.

But I can see why the label “feminist poet” has sometimes been invoked. She expresses a strong awareness of the female body and is ready to deal with it in all its physicality (see the poem “The Soho Hospital for Women” in Below Loughrigg in 1970s; and precise memories of childbirth in “Counting” from 1991’s Time Zones). She shows scepticism of some men’s motives and asks hard questions about real (heterosexual) relationships. There is much sexual frankness, especially in earlier poems like “Against Coupling” (from High Tide in the Garden), advocating, with some irony, a preference for masturbation; or, from the 1960s, “Advice to a Discarded Lover”, which basically tells men to stop whining when their time is up.  Poems about stalkers and threats to women’s safety are found in 1983’s Selected Poems. And in other hands, some of the issues she touches could have been the occasion for preachiness – a fault she scrupulously avoids. In “Witnesses” in The Incident Book she broaches the matter of domestic violence. “Central Time” in Time Zones is about the exploitation of a prostitute. Regarding Adcock’s specifically female experience, I should note how she refers to the two husbands from her marriages in early adulthood. In “Letter to Alistair Campbell” (1977) and “Elegy for Alistair” (2013) she writes about Campbell affectionately and respectfully, recalling good times even if the marriage did not work out. In contrast, the second husband, Barry Crump, is referred to as “that anecdotal ape” in “Poem Ended by a Death” from the collection Below Loughrigg in the 1970s; and Crump is also the subject of some bitter verses in her most recent collection, Hoard.

Picking out poems like these – and only poems like these – one could readily call Adcock a “feminist poet”, and she is clearly sympathetic to feminist causes (note, for example, her admiring verses about the radical English Labour Party MP and feminist Ellen Wilkinson, in Hoard). But her feminism is simply the feminism of expressing what it is like to live a woman’s life, as daughter, wife, lover, mother, grandmother and independent woman. Any adoptable “messages” are implicit only, and for readers to work out. No banners are waved.

Away with solemnity. Adcock has an excellent strain of wit and the ability to banter in verse. I chuckled at her “Proposal for a Survey”, when she was reconnecting with England in  Below Loughrigg. I guffawed at her “The Prize-Winning Poem” from 1983’s Selected Poems. I smirked at her poem resenting anti-smokers in Time Zones. (Though – sorry! – the  wit can become a little catty, as in “Festschrift” in 1997’s Looking Back.)

I must add a few personal notes before I hit my peroration. I’m glad Fleur Adcock wrote “In Memoriam: James K.Baxter” in her 1974 collection. For me, seeing such a measured farewell to the man takes away some of the sickly taste of Allen Curnow’s smug and self-important “Refusal to Read Poems of James K.Baxter to Honour his Memory etc.” I love it when Adcock goes historical and corrects Shakespeare’s fictitious version of Harry Hotspur in her ballad Hotspur. And I delighted in “Leaving the Tate” (in The Incident Book), one of the best articulations I’ve yet encountered on the way art influences the way we see things.

So what’s the peroration? Simply this. I know one week’s reading is not due attention to a whole life’s writing, but my week of reading the Collected Poems was a week of enjoying poems written so clearly and so pungently. Away with the ranks of obscure acrostic-mongers, who think they are writing poetry when they are only signalling their superiority to bewildered readers. Fleur Adcock writes clearly and unambiguously. You know what she is driving at and why. This certainly does not mean that everything can be extracted from one of her poems in a single reading. No worthwhile poem can be read that way. It simply means that she connects with her readership, without condescension. This reader was delighted to be carried along.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

Okay, comparisons are odious and, apart from this brief bibliographical note, I’m not going to make comparisons between two very different poets. A decade younger than Fleur Adcock, Brian Turner is in his 75^th year. Also a handsome hardback with reader’s ribbon, his Selected Poems is a more modest volume that Adcock’s Collected Poems, being about 220 pages of poetry. His selection covers 38 years from his first collection Ladders of Rain (1978) to his most recent Night Fishing (2016), and includes 21 previously uncollected poems. (Reviews of his Elemental [2012] and Night Fishing can be found elsewhere on this blog.) As a final comparison, Turner is unlike Adcock in that he is firmly attached to New Zealand, and very few of his poems stray outside this country. Only from the collection Inside Out (2011) do we get “Easter Monday, Hampstead Heath”, conveying a New Zealander’s  return to the country of his ancestors and his reactions to London, with all his baffled expectations. There are also, in the concluding 21 hithero-unpublished poems, references to visits to Athens, Oregon etc.

Now I move away from reporting and look at the poems themselves.

Nearly all Turner’s poems deal with the South Island landscape, fuana, flora, mountains, rivers (especially boulder-filled one), rocks, winds, deer, wild pigs, harrier hawks, the blue of the sky and those baffling creatures called human beings. There are frequent references to the poet’s pleasure in fishing (sometimes specified as trout fishing) and in cycling.

This is not to say that Turner has never changed as a poet. While the physical milieu is fairly constant, the tone and focus have gradually modulated over the years. Human interface with nature is often harsh in Turner’s earlier works. In his 1978 debut volume, the poem “Four Seasons” has a cruel and dispiriting ending where “like wilting plants / we fight a slow death by depredation”. “Hawk” has a touch of the Ted Hughes with its vision of the bird as a death-bearer. But by the time we reach the collection Footfall (2005), Turner is able to set aside some of his solemnities. In the poem “Cycling in the Maniototo” “I baa at sheep / shout at magpies moo / with cattle, marvel at / the panache of hawks / riding the air…” The very picture of a poet being gay in such a jocund company, even if in the next collection The Six Pack (2006) there are many poems about the howling winds.

As a poet who started publishing only in his mid-30s, Turner has always had an awareness of ageing and of a younger generation pushing behind him, as in the 1983 volume Listening to the River with the poems “The Age of Descent” and “Riding High”. He has also always had a strong streak of confessionalism. The collection Bones (1985) touches on such intimate things in the poems “The Visit” and “Chestnuts on a Mantelpiece”, that we seem to be eavesdropping. Even so, these Selected Poems are, throughout, always discreet about the mother of the poet’s son and other intimacies. These things may be suggested by the poet’s declared feelings, but they are not spelled out.

On the personal level, childhood and the family into which Turner was born loom very large  - especially Turner’s relationship with his parents.  These things began to be examined in Ancestors (1981) and became a major focus in the volume All That Blue Can Be (1989), with a tender poem of childhood memories relating to his mother (“The Mixing Bowl”). The title poem of Beyond (1992) deals with the tragedy of parents ageing. In later collections Turner produces empathetic poems about his father in “Monte Cassino”, “My Father in Autumn” and “Memories of War”, in all of which the father is seen as a man of another generation, doing his duty in time of war, but having his own sensitivities under a rough exterior. The detailed poem “Case Notes” concerns parents’ influence on children, while in Inside Out (2011) “Conversations with my son” looks at the same issue from another angle. The examples of childhood recall are many, with “Taieri Days” (from Just This, 2009) being almost Wordsworthian in its recall of innocence meeting a benign variety of nature.

If I invoke Wordsworth, it’s also of note that, along with the direct experience of nature, Turner also has his poetic and artistic mentors. As early as Ancestors in 1981, he is referring to Eugenio Montale and Denis Glover – joined in Listening to the River by Richard Strauss, from whose “Four Songs” Turner gleans the sad knowledge that “nothing bores deeper than the knowledge of loss”. Naturally, as for any South Island landscape poet, there is the influence of James K. Baxter. In “The Rocks Below” (All That Blue Can Be, 1989), Turner declares “On this wild exposed coast the young Baxter / mooched and meandered and grappled / with the anguish of wondering if he would ever grown up / someone of consequence.” As I’ve said before on this blog, one can’t help wondering if Turner’s “Abandoned Homestead” in the same collection didn’t take a nudge from Baxter’s “The Fallen House”. Later in the Selected Poems, Turner often expreses his pleasure in listening to classical music.

There is also a strain of sophisticated wit in Turner’s work. It really comes to the fore in the 2001 collection Taking Off with “Semi-Kiwi”, about not being a handyman, and the linguistic fun of “Take Heart”. Going aphoristic (as Turner often does) there is in the 2011 collection Inside Out, the one-line poem “New Zealanders, a Definition” which reads in its entirety  “Born here, buggered it up.”

As you can see, I have gone bibliographic in this notice so far, and have foolishly ignored Turner’s craft while counting off his most constant themes. If pithiness and aphorism are often his forte, we cannot ignore the aptness of his imagery. If I began quoting this in detail, I would continue to tedious length. I’ll satisfy myself by quoting, from 1985’s Bones, the melancholy lines of “October in the Otamita” which yield up the arresting image “the hot October sun / bastes a glaze on the water / that shines like shellac” Yes!!!

Nominating favourites from a poet’s life work is usually verboten in reviews of volumes such as this one, but I can say that I kept coming back to, and re-reading, the heart-stopper “Firstborn”, about what truths one can tell a child (from All that Blue Can Be, 1989) and the equally affecting “Beyond”, dealing with the tragedy of parents ageing (from Beyond 1992). Like them, “Easter Monday, Hampstead Heath” (from the collection Inside Out, 2011) is a densely-written and meaningful poem, carefully wrought, and saying much about the Pakeha New Zealander condition. For some reason, too, the delightful  “Alp” (from All that Blue Can Be) sticks in my mind. It is one of Turner’s best poems giving a personality to nature.

As I said at the top of this notice, comparisons are indeed odious, but I can’t help setting Turner beside some younger poets who have also dealt extensively with the South Island landscape. DavidEggleton has a broader vision, a greater sense of humanity in the landscape and a very strong sense of how the different cultures have had an impact on it. His verse bounces and is often wildly satirical. Unlike Eggleton, but like some South Island poets (Owen Marshall, for example), Turner shows very little awareness of Maori in the landscape. Richard Reeve creates more chiselled verse out of the South Island, and is our moralist of the scene, always aware of the deleterious effect of human impact upon the environment. Turner makes a few gestures to environmentalism in later poems such as “Dry River” and “As We Have Long Been Doing”, which are somewhat preachy about ecology. But he is more often the solitary man contemplating the wilderness, relating this to how his heart feels and frequently – very frequently – expressing a sense of loss. Is this the loss of childhood, or love or solidarity with the dead or a sense of the eternal decay of things? All of these things perhaps. The wind blows, the tussock moves, the mountains loom, the hawk circles and the poems stick in your mind. What more can one say?