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.

                                   GOODBYE KEVIN IRELAND 

Kevin Ireland died in the week I am writing this.

I’m not going to pretend that I knew Kevin Ireland, who was decades older than me and of a different generation. I met him only twice and that was very briefly in both cases, one being when a publisher introduced me to him and he grunted politely, shook my hand with a leathery grip and moved on. I once knew quite well a woman who claimed to have had an affair with him, but I haven’t seen her for years. So I know him only by his work, which might be the best way to judge any author.

 To remind you of his curriculum vitae, [which I’ve filched from various obituaries] Kevin Jowsey was born in July 1933 in the Auckland suburb Mt. Albert, whence his family moved to the North Shore when he was a kid. He died in May 2023, just two months before his 90^th birthday. He adopted the name Ireland when he was a young adult. Kevin Ireland was a prolific poet, producing nearly 20 books of poetry. Poetry was his strongest suit, but in his later years, when he was already in his 60s, he took up prose. He wrote a collection of short-stories, six novels and two memoirs. As is often noted, he left New Zealand for 25 years, working mainly in England, but he always wrote of New Zealand.  He married a number of times and had some children.

When I reviewed on this blog his 2022 collection Just Like That, I remarked: “In terms of current prosody, Kevin Ireland is a heretic. He insists on writing in neat, orderly stanzas, four or five lines per stanza by preference, instead of letting his words dribble haphazardly down the page. He knows there is a difference between prose and poetry. If he’s polemical he’s polemical discreetly and does not beat a big drum. Worst of all (and this is the man’s greatest sin) he does not write in a cryptic code decipherable only by a small clique. Kevin Ireland makes his meaning clear. Obviously the man has not been to an approved writing school. He should therefore be condemned and burnt at the stake…. Translation – Ireland writes lucidly, clearly and understandably. The nerve of the man!” [Sarcastic little bugger aren’t I?]

I appreciated the clarity and forthrightness of his poetry, a praise which I could also give to much of the poetry of his long-time friend C. K. Stead. But I don’t want go overboard about this. Often I found a strain of blokey-ness in Ireland’s work which was not for me, especially in poems where he says he likes more than anything a red wine and a good steak.  In the 1950s and after his return to New Zealand, he was very much part of the informal North Shore group centred on Frank Sargeson. It was mainly a blokey group (save for some passing-through people like Janet Frame) and in retrospect it was a group flaunting macho ideas which, in the case of Sargeson, often meant misogyny. At the time, Ireland and his mates would have seen themselves as rebels against conformist Kiwi suburban-ism, but much of what was produced then now reads very differently, and the rebels more churlish than rebellious.

All of which is saying that times change and fashions change and a reasonable perspective would allow us to admit that in literature, much of what is now lauded will inevitably look tattered, dated and simply wrong in 50 years’ time.

In a way though, I admire Kevin Ireland for holding to his chosen world-view. There is a very good poem in the collection Just Like That called “Old military families” in which he refers to forebears who fought in the Boer War and other wars for the British Empire.  He remarks “I’m old and tired of it all, and now / feel only the greatest love and respect / for the regiments of them. Whatever they got up to / and wherever they went, they were people / of their times. I can’t impose a distant right / or wrong on them, for history does that job / with its sure inconsistencies. It’s a cruel record / not so much for what it tells us of the things / we did, or failed to do, but for the changing ways / we read it. The past has altered so much / since I was a boy that it cannot help but seem / a dangerous place. Best to go there unafraid / and choose to face the ancestors of us all.”

In an age when we are called upon to feel guilty for things that happened long before we existed, this is a courageous statement. And even if I’m not on board with all Kevin Ireland’s world-view, I applaud him for sticking to his guns.