Michele Leggott was the New Zealand poet laureate from 2007-08. She convenes a poetry course at Auckland University where, like Marsh, she’s a Professor. She made her international reputation by writing an amazing book on Louis Zukovsky, Reading Zukovsky’s “80 Flowers” (1989), based on the dissertation she completed at Vancouver on the Pacific South West Coast of Canada. There’s no getting away from that big water, not even by close-reading Louis. These days, Leggott cannot close-read as she’s lost her sight; her poems have begun to delegate perception and its record to other senses, transforming her loss into a net gain for us, her fortunate readers.
Murray Edmond also teaches at Auckland University (drama). If there is a pattern emerging here, it’s only slightly connected to the fact that I work there too, for the time being, though only after having nothing to do with my alma mater (or any other university) since leaving without a backward glance in 1969. Perhaps this clustering has something to do with the ‘local’ flavour of this chapbook. Edmond was part of the ‘The Word is Freed’ (or just plain ‘Freed’) group of poets at Auckland University in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Close to thirty years later he, Michele Leggott, and the late and greatly mourned Alan Brunton edited a reunion of the wider confederacy of poets for whom the Freed mob acted a bit like the distributor in an internal combustion engine; called Big Smoke: New Zealand Poems 1960-1975 (2000). the collection probably pretended that ‘the local’ was a lot more homogeneous than I remember. Then, as now, ‘local’ for me was anywhere between the Chelsea Sugar Works and Albert Park. Edmond’s is a dramatic monologue poem, ‘Conversation with My Uncle’, also contains the ghost-voices of two Pacific post-settler narratives; Frank Sargeson’s autobiographical story ‘Conversation with My Uncle’, first collected in the 1936 book, Conversation with My Uncle and Other Sketches; and Denis Glover’s poem ‘The Magpies’, first published in 1941 in a Caxton Press anthology, whose mordant refrain, ‘And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle/ The magpies said’ contains the most known-by-heart lines of poetry in New Zealand.
John Newton, our fourth Pacific Islander in this chapbook, lives on Waiheke Island in the Hauraki Gulf, half an hour by ferry from Auckland. This is a pleasant place … where good wine is cultivated, where a number of artists live, and where Newton has just finished writing a magnificent book about his own local beginnings somewhere rather different – the northern end of the South Island in Marlborough and North Canterbury. Much of Newton’s soon-to-be-published book is written in deadpan blank verse lines of ten syllables, but you don’t have to read far in to hear the plangent, laconic skrawk of a guitar tuned to something like Jayhawks ‘Save it for a Rainy Day’ (Newton also fronts an excellent band, The Tenderisers) – the tread of the blank verse flattened out by syllabic measure. The poem included here, from a long sequence called ‘High Lonesome’, breaks that form somewhat, but the muso measure is still there. I sometimes wonder about the coincidence (all it is, surely) that our John Newton’s namesake, John Henry Newton (1725-1807) wrote ‘Amazing Grace’. Does ‘our John’ sing that in the shower, on Waiheke, with Pacific morning sunlight coming in?
Sam Sampson’s local is samsampson.co.nz and his first book, Everything Talks (2008) was published by, yes, Auckland University Press. The title of his recent collaboration with the photographer Harvey Benge … exclusivity dwells in habitat (FAQ editions, 2012), says all we need to know about the above questions 1 and 2, but Sampson, being in this selection also allows me to give question 3 the short answer it deserves: Yes. Because they write good poems.
-Ian Wedde, Saturday 10 November 2012
(Sunny 20°C, Southwest winds, spent most of the day with my granddaughter Bella Leia. We planted heritage Paul Robeson tomato plants in tubs on the patio – $3.70 GST incl. for 7 seeds on TradeMe. We were about a block from where I lived as a student at Auckland University in the 1960s, when this suburb was Pacific Island and working class Irish. It’s a bit more posh now, ‘exclusive’ some would say; but in most respects it’s still just the ‘habitat’, half way between the Chelsea Sugar Works and Albert Park, with views down the Hauraki Gulf towards Waiheke.)
