In early January, my family and I made our annual pilgrimmage to Waihi Beach, some 70 kilometres north of Astrolabe Reef, where the cargo ship Rena ran aground last October. Heading down to the beach one morning after a storm, we joined a crowd which had gathered to contemplate, at close quarters, fifteen washed-up containers from the vessel.
Since my earlier blog precipitated by the wreck of the Rena off the New Zealand coast (November 24), the vessel has broken in half, releasing hundreds of these shipping containers into the surrounding waters. Luckily for us, the foulest consignments—sides of beef and other heavy foodstuffs left rotting for months—washed up much further south.
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A Sextant for the Renavigation of Astrolabe, © Gregory O'Brien 2012 |
At the far end of Waihi Beach, however, a container of shoes had been peeled open by the waves, releasing its cargo into the roiling waters. As well as a flotilla of ladies' footwear, innumerable latex gloves, from another busted container, had been washed ashore—hand-shaped jellyfish ghosting through the surf. While the scene was admittedly rich in poetic resonances, particularly for the surrealistically inclined, it was also a chilling reminder of how at odds humanity can be with its environment.
The morning after this unlikely landfall, graders and cranes were pushing, prodding and lifting the damaged containers, removing them from the beach and placing them on trucks destined for Tauranga. The crews had become well-drilled at this procedure, having been kept busy retrieving cargo from up and down the Bay of Plenty coastline for some months. When placed the right way up, containers laden with sacks of milk-powder turned the surrounding waters an opaque white, and a sulphurous stench drifted across the dunes. A health warning stated that anyone with dairy allergies should stay out of the ocean.
At remote Orokawa Bay, two weeks later, we came upon yet another container, laid out like a beached whale; wooden planks were piled up along the high-tide mark like a giant game of oceanic pick-up-sticks. Evidently, no one could be bothered retrieving this shattered container and its contents from such an out-of-the-way place.
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| News of the Swimmer Reaches Shore is Gregory O'Brien's is book-length meditation on France, New Zealand, Modernism and sub-aquaticism. It is published by Carcanet. |
By the middle of February, it felt as if this unlikely flotilla had followed me as far as Ireland and Great Britain, where I was reading at the the Cork Spring Poetry Festival and elsewhere. In Cork I recognised a familiar note in Greg Delanty's 'An Oil Spillage', with its inventory of human and avian seasiders and its conclusion: 'None can escape the dark spreading here.' I picked up, in Delanty's work, a notion of poetry as a kind of subtle activism, both cautionary presence and protest. Such an engagement between poetry and environmental issues was also at the heart of matters in Manchester, where I spoke at the university, and in Glasgow, where an essay by Alan Riach reminded me of Gerard Manley Hopkins in proto-environmentalist mode:
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Hopkins' 'Inversnaid' suggests the deep human need for places where we can still experience soulful communion with unspoiled nature. You could argue that any engagement with such realities is inherently political — whether the poet is Hopkins or Delanty, and whether the year is 1918 or 2012. In the work of both, there are pervasive narratives of humanity getting it right and getting it wrong, of idealism and cataclysm. I detected a similar literary environmentalism — an outwardly spiralling 'inscape' — in the work of Darragh Breen, Kerry Harding and others I heard at the Cork festival.
I have written in PN Review 204 about my own recent encounter with pristine, untrammelled nature during a voyage to the subtropical Kermadec Islands, half way between mainland New Zealand and Tonga. The purpose of that expedition was to raise awareness of a remote territory of New Zealand and to pursuade the Government to declare the region a marine sanctuary, a zone where debacles like the wreck of the Rena could never happen. At the time of writing, that discussion is ongoing and vigorous. Beyond their immense scientific value, places like the Kermadecs — and Hopkins' Inversnaid, for that matter — stand as repositories of human yearning and dreaming; they are essential realities, where we can still experience most acutely (and I'll quote Delanty again) 'the shoals of light / leaping across the swaying sea / and the gulls gliding out of sight'.
Art produced during and after the 'Kermadec' voyage can be seen here.
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Here is an interview with Greg O'Brien about his voyage to the Kermadecs, the most remote part of New Zealand and one of the greatest, least known, pristine ocean sites on the planet:
Born in Matamata, New Zealand, in 1961, Gregory O'Brien has lived in Wellington since 1989, where he is writer, painter and senior curator at City Gallery Wellington. As well as numerous pamphlets, he has published seven collections of poetry, among them Days Beside Water (Carcanet, 1994) and Afternoon of an Evening Train (Victoria University Press, 2005). With Jenny Bornholdt and Mark Williams, he co-edited An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry (In English), which appeared from Oxford University Press in 1997. A collection of his writings about New Zealand art and literature, After Bathing at Baxter's: Essays and Notebooks, was published in 2002. His books about New Zealand visual arts include Lands and Deeds: Profiles of New Zealand Painters (1996), Hotere out the Black Window (1997) and Welcome to the South Seas: Contemporary New Zealand Art for young people (AUP, 2004).