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| John Dennison's Otherwise is available on paperback and as an eBook from Carcanet |
On 11th February, New Zealand poet John Dennison launched his new collection Otherwise (Carcanet, February 2015) in Wellington. Fellow Carcanet poet and Wellingtonian Greg O'Brien opened the evening with a beautiful speech praising John's accomplishments as a poet. We have posted the speech for you here:
It must be nearly fifteen years ago that John Dennison drove the No. 14 bus. A few times daily he would glide graciously along our street, Waipapa Rd. Occasionally he would say hello out the window. As a bus-driver he was exemplary: Courteous, attentive, responsive, never in too much of a hurry; he had a sense of timing, and he was on time. Yet he would pause for stragglers, rather than accelerate off without them. He would smile, but never ingratiatingly. He was in control.
Such qualities are as good to find in a poet as they are in a bus-driver. At the wheel, Dennison was good humoured and congenial; he welcomed people aboard. John was and is a listener as well as a looker. Like any socially-minded citizen, he keeps to the left… I could go on.
I was reflecting on John’s earlier career a few months back when he chauffeured me and a couple of friends up to Jerusalem, on the Whanganui River. How you drive a vehicle says a lot about a person. Any commuter confronting the panoply of human emotions on display every rush hour will know what I mean. The jaunt up the River Road in the mini-bus, went—I am happy to report--impeccably, the road unfurling before us like a magic carpet. The curves and bends John took in his well-practised stride. ‘The car hugged the road,’ as the Dominion motoring pages would put it, awkwardly.
Along the way someone read a Baxter poem. At another opportune moment, all the males in the mini-van jumped into the freezing river—a baptism of sorts--while Sister Sue, of the Home of Compassion, looked resolutely the other way. Outside the old convent at Hiruharama, we made expresso coffee on a table-top primus, of which the radiometer on the cover of John’s book now reminds me.
The question we need to ask at the launching of this book is: what sort of a bus is John driving now? A vehicle in which the lines of each poem are neatly arranged, like rows of seats, this sleek, handsome volume of verse is now the newest mode of transport into and through various territories of John Dennison’s life and art. It is the book about the journey and it is the journey itself; it is both the Road Code and the road. It is The Street Called Straight and it is Baxter’s antipodean River Road. It is many things and it is itself.
Poetically, the verse suggests lessons learnt from Seamus Heaney, as from Manley Hopkins. Bearing in mind another influence, Allen Curnow, the book could be described as a medium-sized bus with large windows. There are faint echoes of John Donne, as there are of the Scotsman Norman MacCaig. Equally importantly, however, are the less familiar voices that climb, of their own volition, aboard John’s bus: the community of voices in his ear—his family, friends, fellow travellers, pilgrims of the No. 14 route from the Railway Station to Kilbirnie depot. And in the midst of it all, of course, his own measured, mellifluous voice.
It is rare, these days, to find a poetry that is so intrinsically hopeful and generous-spirited; that is played compellingly in a major rather than a minor key. Remaining positive about the present-day world is no simple or easy matter. It can involve some very complicated manoeuvrings; it involves humility, willpower and a kind of genius.
In the digital age, reality can often feel reduced to a flat screen. In John’s constant grappling with the implications of things and thoughts, he allows them their three dimensionality, their shape and presence. He allows reality its fullness and ripeness, its slowness, and its inwardness. In this regard, his poetry projects the old technology of a Crooke’s Radiometer more than it does a USB or hard-drive. It is a bold and necessary undertaking in these postmodern, pixelated and media-pummelled times.
John articulates doubts as he does certainties, and the process by which, in the mind and soul of each individual, one becomes the other. Throughout Otherwise, we witness John adjusting the existential as well as the theological radiometer, measuring the light, the life-force. I agree with Vincent O’Sullivan when he likens John’s poetry to that of Allen Curnow in its capacity to present ‘ordinary events as philosophical appointments’. Everything is a proposition, a question, a matter to be negotiated, adjusted, reappraised (maybe Dennison’s radiometer also functions as a moral compass?).
And then there is the music of the poems—alliterative, deftly rhymed - far more like songs than sermons. Poetic form, for John Dennison, is both a motor and brake; it makes things happen and it makes things pause. I imagine the inspector of poetic forms coming aboard this bus and giving it a huge tick.
That poetry might still be a ‘proving ground of love’, to borrow a phrase from John, rather than just a verbal skating rink is one of the book’s most radical propositions. Which brings me back to the bus that John Dennison is still driving in 2015 and the overarching fact that this book -‘this crystal palace, this sometime church’ - is fundamentally an act of individual and collective devotion. And therein lies my final point: In these less than devout times, it’s reassuring to know that some buses do, in fact, kneel down. Dennison’s book is one of those buses. And, as Wellingtonians we also know that some forms of public transport, electrically inclined, get their power from overhead, from on high. So, also, the Dennison poem.
This new, immaculately produced book, Otherwise, is an exquisite argument on behalf of a writer’s craft and vocation. Herein poetry reveals itself as an act of faith, an endlessly renewable energy source and a viable form of transport.
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| John Dennison reading from Otherwise at the Wellington launch. Photo Credit: Robert Cross |
The Carcanet Blog Sale
With every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.
With every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.
For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off John Dennison's Otherwise
All books come with 10% off and and free delivery at www.carcanet.co.uk so to claim your extra discount, use the code BLOG (case-sensitive). Happy reading!