Sitting with a bundle of books outside a lodge on Chatham Island/Rekohu- 900 kilometres to the east of mainland New Zealand - I am observing a weka going inquisitively about the early morning lawn. I'm told that these flightless birds are remarkable nest builders; they eat brittle paua (abalone) shells then regurgitate the partially digested mixture. This they use as an ultra-efficient cement to hold together more accustomed nesting materials: speargrass, leaves, pieces of string and feathers. Weka nests, I'm told, can last for decades.
When I go inside the lodge, the impetuous bird - imagine a cross between a kiwi and a parrot - darts over to my belongings and starts rifling through them. (If a window is left open, I have been warned, wekas have been known to trash hotel rooms.) Returning a moment later with my camera, the bird has selected a book from the pile beside my chair and is dragging it across the lawn, heading for the adjacent bush. The itinerant book is
Yves Bonnefoy's
On the Motion and Immobility of Douve. Maybe the weka was attracted by the shiney whiteness of its cover. I can't say I am not tempted to let the bird have the volume just to see what will become of it. In a few days' time, I could follow the bird back to its nest and observe how Bonnefoy's words have been shredded and interwoven with the usual matter, all held together by the glittering paua-cement. This kind of recasting or rephrasing of his poetry would appeal to Bonnefoy, a great translator himself. And, of course, in the midst of this imagined, wordy assemblage, the weka's curious young would be noisily installed.
I pause and then decide to wrestle the book back from the bird - I am flying back to the mainland New Zealand in the morning; there would be no time to find the nest and, besides, I need the Bonnefoy more than the bird does. I am left to imagine how the strands of poetry mingled with toitoi, pohutukawa, pulverised paua-shell, twigs and birdshit would have elaborated an artistic truth: that art should encompass everything. How, like the weka-nest, art needs its raw, earthy materials, its recycled waste, as it does its high, lyrical utterance.
Yves Bonnefoy's New and Selected Poems
are available now from www.carcanet.co.uk.
Gregory O'Brien is a writer and 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 Beauties of the Octagonal Pool
(Auckland University Press, 2012). His book-length meditation on France, New Zealand, Modernism and sub-aquaticism is titled News of the Swimmer Reaches Shore (Carcanet 2007).
