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.
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I will take the more formidable example first. Fleur
Adcock, now in her 86th 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 19th
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.
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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 75th 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?
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