Something New

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

POEMS IN RETROSPECT- A selection by Stephen Oliver (Greywacke Press Canberra, Australian Price $30) ; “THE GIRL FROM SARAJEVO” by Stef Harris (Quentin Wilson Publishing, $NZ35)

 

One of the most difficult things that a reviewer can do is to cover a poet’s whole life’s work. There will be effective and engaging poems and there will be flat and out-dated poems. Stephen Oliver’s Poems in Retrospect has been sitting on my desk for about four months, and in that time I have been reading my way through, it poem by poem. But you can’t critique every single poem in such a review, unless you want to write a couple of hundred pages. 380 pages long, Poems in Retrospect is a selection of the poetry Stephen Oliver has written between 1975 and 2023. New Zealand born and raised, Oliver lived in Australia for about twenty years and has now returned to New Zealand. He is published in both Australia and New Zealand. Poems in Retrospect was published by an Australian imprint. I make it clear that I was well acquainted with Oliver’s work before I began to read this expansive selection. On this blog you can find my [brief] comments on Oliver’s The Song of Globule and on his Luxembourg .

So to the text, where I deal with each collection that Stephen Oliver has written.

HENWISE (published 1975) stays with the barnyard and the chickens – in other words, a reflection on how animals behave. It is refreshingly clear in its vocabulary, but Oliver does use the situation to reference a “blood wedding” and he does mention the “Assembly of Fowls”, recalling the medieval days. Very readable.

THE NIGHT OF WAREHOUSES (published 1978 – 2000) deals with many more hard-headed things. Yes, he has poems dealing with rain, bird’s migration and a yearning for simplicity where it “takes me back to initial ancestors / who coupled together in thyme / who created the memory of me / that takes me back… I am vintage / of all that consumes me.”  But in this collection he also produces poems about hard times in Auckland and becoming discontented with the city. This was, it seems, the beginning of his tendency to write critically about flaws in our society. He writes a poem honouring Hone Tuwhare; and in poems like “A “Far Noise From Near Things” comes across as an early cry about climate change as “the years pushed out by light, / the greenhouse globe over-photographed…”. At the same time – in step with trends back then – he makes critical comments about the history of the beat and post-beat poetry that was fashionable in the 1950s. He also makes reference to American pop culture in “Pat Boone and Tonto”. In this respect he makes references to some literary figures who are now largely forgotten.

NEW POEMS 1998 – 2000 often takes us into many controversial things. For example the poem “Copestone For a Nation”, over-heated and running together ideas that do not make themselves clear. As far as I can make it, Oliver is telling us that (in the past) colonial settlers were evil. It begins, “ Here is the place which flourished once in rampant / dishonesties, and there stands the sheared monuments / …boldly the canker creeps…” But he does not make his case clearly. Much of this section also deals with the U.S.A.

BALLADS, SATIRE & SALT: A Book of Diversions (published 2003) has the great merit of being clear and readable… and genuinely funny, especially in the poems “An Actual Encounter with the Sun on my Balcony at France Street” with the sun chastising him for being a lazy poet. Later – and justifiably – he takes some lashes at pub poets. Incidentally, it is at this stage that her cheerfully refers to movies like “Badlands” and “Fort Apache”.

EITHER SIDE OF THE HORIZON (published 2005) gives us “Letter to an Astronomer”, one of Oliver’s very best, a coherent discourse on the uncertainty about the universe, the “whirling of immeasurable galaxies” and how little we know despite all the knowledge that we think we have. Oliver turns to prose poetry in much of this section, often protesting current problems, such as “A Country Mile” about lethal landmines; “Emblem” ; “Morning Sends the Heart Soaring”; and in “A Simple Tale” a moving account of the way the Talban destroyed the famous statue of the Buddha. After this, there is a very long sequence called “Occupations”. It is made of 106 stanzas through many pages  (it began to make me think of Ezra Pound’s unending Cantos)… and Oliver’s purpose seems to be telling us all the flaws of Australia. There is much angry protest here.

HARMONIC (published 2008) deals with some sorrowful things. He laments poets who were killed in war, starting with “Charles Hamilton Sorley” who died in battle in 1915 when he was twenty. He does some speculation on “Should Angels Dance on a Pinhead” [though Oliver is not as well informed on this old canard as he thinks he is]. It is almost a relief after this to read his purely descriptive poem “Marooned” which begins “Groups of gulls at intervals / heading to the mountain, and the sea, / the other side of it; /  to a stretch of blue-grey water in a / gully, reservoir, or a refuse tip…”

INTERCOLONIAL (published in 2013] is, I believe, the very best work Oliver ever wrote. In this selection we are given 25 pages of neatly presented four-line stanzas – mostly 7 stanzas per page. [And this is only part of the full poem.] What is this major poem about? Oliver deals with Wellington and environs as they were in earlier years, focusing on earthquakes that changed the land, shipwrecks and the perils of the sea… but then he moves to the way ships connected New Zealand with Australia, hence the title “Intercolonial”. Into all this he weaves notes on forebears, Marxism and the effects of booze. Not only is this enlightening about an age, a mood and a connection of nations [he has stanzas set in Oz], but he writes clearly without the obfuscation that clouds up some of his earlier works. It is an essential work and should be read by every literate Australian and New Zealander.

And so to lighter relief with GONE: SATIRICAL POEMS: New and Selected (published in 2016). Oliver gives us the sad “Ballad of Miss Goodbar” [the name of an American film which I once had to sit through] about a woman self-destructing by her addiction to rough sex. Then he has a go at certain writer – jocular sometimes and sometimes chastising.  There is “Dylan Thomas” with his death-by-alcohol. There is “Ballade of a Glossy” making fun of the gossip and drivel that fill the Australian Women’s Weekly . Then there is, ten pages long, “Letter to James K. Baxter”. Reading it reminded me of W.H. Auden’s “Letter to Lord Byron” i.e. a living poet addressing a dead poet. But whereas Auden deals with trends in society as it was is Auden’s day, I regret to say that Oliver turns to rant. But at least in this collection of satire, there is the fun of “Ballad of the Taj Mahal”, serenading a men’s dunny that used to be in Wellington.

At which point come LUXEMBOURG (published in 2018), turning to Europe; and THE SONG OF THE GLOBULE – 80 sonnets. Forgive me if I skim over these but, as I said at the beginning of this review, I have already written about these.

Finally comes CRANIAL BUNKER (published in 2023) delving into the negative side of humanity, much of it about the inadequate nature of most politics and the death of idealism. ‘Factory Town” gives us a dour view of the city where “Nobody talks about the mayor’s / speech he gave a few years back; the brouhaha it caused / the boosterism, hand claps and back slaps - / turning the munitions factory into a museum- theme park / revitalization of our abandoned factory town.” But out of a sheer cynical bent, I enjoyed the “Epigrams for the Disenchanted”.

I hope you understand that in writing this review I have made reference to only a very small number of Stephen Oliver’s work. Poems in Retrospect consists of many hundreds of poems. I have quoted only about thirty. In the earlier poems, I think Oliver was simply testing the waters. His early attempts at philosophising often come across as incoherent. He hits his target when he looks at concrete things, leading to his very best work Intercolonial. What is clearly in front of the reader is always more comprehensible. I am surprised that, in such a long “selection”, there are no poems [apart from the ironical ones] about intimacy and love.

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Now moving to two novella. I won’t beat about the bush. If you read this blog often you will be aware that I write reviews of fiction and non-fiction, and I like to analyse them in detail – sometimes perhaps in too much detail. But there are some books that can be reviewed more briskly. This does not mean that I brush such books aside thoughtlessly. It simply means that some books can be very easily understood and do not require great analysis. Thus is the case with Stef Harris’s two novellas The Girl From Sarajavo.

Stef Harris was a policeman for most of his life. His two novellas both deal with some level of criminality.

First Novella -  about 65 pages long - The Girl From Sarajavo. Katia comes to New Zealand from what used to be called Yugoslavia. She lives alone. She earns some money by working in a brothel [which she calls “the sausage factory”]. She desperately wants to be a published writer. She goes to a writing school but gets nowhere. Enter her neighbour, an old man, also Croatian, who helps her. He writes a novel in the Croatian language which she translates into English. She rewards lecherous old coot with sex. She passes off the novel as her all her own work. A publisher picks it up. It becomes a best seller. And… Okay, there is much more plot yet to come and I won’t be so nasty as to reveal everything that happens, especially because there are quite a few neat twists and finally a big sting-in-the-tale. Stef Harris obviously knows writing courses and their frequent bitchiness. He also has a good go at the media who puff up celebrities and then deflate them. So what’s a fair judgement on this novella?  It reads easily [I happily read it in one sitting]. It’s a good yarn. Is it great literature? Of course not. But I think a big audience would enjoy it.

Second novella The Other Jasmine – about 150 pages long – is unfortunately not up to the same level. Opportunistic young Chinese woman comes to New Zealand to marry a Kiwi so that she can become a New Zealand citizen… but the bloke she marries for convenience is a nitwit living with his horrible mother and they appear to be uncouth yokels. Retired police officer is worried because the same family had once “adopted” a young Chinese woman who had mysteriously disappeared. Had she been murdered? Retired police officer tries to work out what had happened, as well as making it his business to protect the  (new) Chinese woman. So far so more-or-less believable and Stef Harris – formerly a policeman - clearly knows much about New Zealand laws pertaining to immigration and how sleuths work. So far so reasonable. But gradually The Other Jasmine collapses into unlikely events and implausible nonsense ending with the type of shoot-out that would best be in an old-time B-movie. I say this with regret. The blurb that came with the book tells me that Stef Harris was for some years “a community constable working with immigrant women victims of family violence.” Perhaps Harris should have stepped back into reality and away from the melodrama…. And once again a certain audience would like this sort of thing