This week's blog post brings you an article written by New Zealand-dwelling poet John Dennison, whose debut collection Otherwise is published by Carcanet in February 2015. John writes of his trip with Carcanet's Managing Editor Michael Schmidt, and fellow Carcanet poet and NZ native, Greg O'Brien across New Zealand's North Island in search of the grave of James K. Baxter.
As unlikely and dislocating as it might seem, elsewhere it is spring. Fittingly enough, we’re on pilgrimage – more literary than religious – trundling up the Whanganui river in search of that most recusant and sonorous of New Zealand’s poets, James K. Baxter. Around each bend we look expectantly for the spire and convent roof of Hiruharama, marginal and overlooked obverse of its transliterative name-sake Jerusalem, a tiny, unbloodied missionary settlement where Baxter, following a vision, tried to establish an alternative community alongside the Catholic sisters and local Maori. I anxiously navigate the car up the sheep-strewn and torturous river road, quietly surprised to be accompanying one of England’s leading poet-critics on this antipodean pilgrimage; who knew Baxter had such passionate readers in England? But then, it is surely a sign of poetic health in the Irish and British archipelago that there are readers who resist the comforts of those islands’ various and centrally routed feed-back loops to seek out the unaccommodated voices of this Anglophone beyond: Baxter, Allen Curnow, Bill Manhire, Dinah Hawken, Jenny Bornholdt, Sarah Broom, Vincent O’Sullivan...
The land here is difficult. Largely mudstone, it manages to be precipitous and slumped at once, the results quickly lifting in a fine, intrusive dust. The river muscles greenly through it all, not looking to accommodate anything much except gravity. In the background, Ruapehu – a massive and active volcano – lets go its snows. My companion, like so many before him, attempts translation: those trees are so New Hampshire; this flaky cliff-edge road is very much like the roads in Mexico; that’s flax! but so different from the European flax; and what is that bird? In the end, such dislocation cannot be accommodated, only given in to, the strange chittering and eardrop of local song still upsetting the northern ear. And, fittingly enough, our pilgrimage proper ends with a full, baptismal immersion in the uncompromising snowmelt of the Whanganui.
Immersion is also, of course, the way to tackle a poet of such lively recalcitrance and scope as Baxter who, through a wily and sustained accommodation of Anglophone literary tradition, produced a massive, uneven, yet thoroughly lithe body of work that stretches from devotional to obscene verse, political balladry to Zen-like meditation. Always in motion, his oeuvre culminates in a remarkably spare late style – a sine qua non of any reading in Anglophone poetics – which is utterly exposed in its kenotic Christianity:
It’s a long time nowSince the great ikons fell down,God, Mary, home, sex, poetry,
Whatever one uses as a bridgeTo cross the river that only has one beach,
And even one’s name is a way of saying –‘This gap inside a coat’ – the darkness I call God,
The darkness I call Te Whaea, how can theytranslate
The blue calm evening sky that a plane tunnels
through
Like a little wasp, or the bucket in my hand,Into something else? I go on looking
For mushrooms in the field, and the fist of
longing
Punches my heart, until it is too dark to see.‘The Ikons’
We read Baxter’s Jerusalem Sonnets by Baxter’s grave, from which onion weed sprouts. It’s all fitting enough.
Although too few poetic heads have been fully immersed in late Baxter, the standing invitation to traverse the elsewheres of poetry from Aotearoa/New Zealand – an invitation extended by Robyn Marsack of the Scottish Poetry Library, and by Michael Schmidt’s Carcanet – cannot but prove a quickening dislocation for the northern ear.Within the tight poetic economy of the British and Irish archipelago alone, it’s a commonplace that reviving notes frequently come from the margins – Niall Campbell of South Uist, Caoilinn Hughes of Galway, Jen Hadfield in Shetland. So much is suggested by the way in which the linguistic acuities and spiritual-cum-epistemic predicament of the later poems in Allen Curnow’s Continuum inform the unroofed style of Seamus Heaney’s Seeing Things – who would have guessed?
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| Greg O'Brien |
Indeed, the disruption brought about in any settled poetic state by reading Curnow’s work marks his as the most neglected – and most promising – influence from among the Anglophone masters of the late twentieth century. No less metaphysically attuned than Baxter (although mired in refusals), Curnow plays his post-Christian perplexities across multiple keyboards of English at once, composing a kind of unhoused, unanswered kyrie:
a hesitancy to speakis a hesitancy of the earth rolling back and awaybehind this man going down to the sea with a
bag
tide,to pick mussels, having an arrangement with the
metres,the ocean to be shallowed three point seven
one hour’s light to be left and there’s the
excrescent
moon sponging off the last of it. A door
slams, a heavy wave, a door, the sea-floorshudders.
Down you go alone, so late, into the surge-black
fissure.
‘You Will Know When You Get There’
The invitation, then, heading into the long dark of the Northern Winter, is to pilgrimage through strange song, to full immersion in the snowmelt of this unaccommodated elsewhere.
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| From left to right: Michael Schmidt, Greg O'Brien, John Dennison, Angel |
First published in New Walk issue 8. www.newwalkmagazine.bigcartel.com
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