I gazed bleakly at the distant bush. Tomorrow I would have to start trying to find the Great Swamp of the Manawatu. Then I would start the arduous task of collecting moths, butterflies and Indian arrow-heads, dodging the pool covered with green slime, around which my Moder paced at night calling my Fader’s name. I would spy on the flickering lights of the Carson Gang signalling to each other where the best Redwoods were for smuggling out, and finally trudge along the twenty miles to the High School in Palmerston North, carrying my bucket of lunch and a load of Indian arrow-heads carefully bunched in my skirt to sell to the Manager of the Bank of New Zealand, to pay for the books, dry goods, and my tuition. It would be a terrible life, but with grit and spunk I would pull through. As I knocked on the door of the Bank of New Zealand I could see a faint curve of sadness on my young lips, half concealing a smile—one for sweet buried childhood, and one for the broadening days.
(1980)
John Newton, ‘Opening the Book’
You open the book
and there unfolds a road its skin is blue, it is summer
the heat that dances in its hollows turns
into water. You ride it in the vehicles of strangers:
homesteads and haybarns dusty yellow sheeptrucks
convoy of soldiers in jungle greens returning
from an exercise
slipping past their polarised windscreens;
you draw from them splinters of lives made of words
though you never take your eyes off the mountains.
The mountains reach out to embrace you
they fold their blue ankles
they give birth to rivers, they
can even crouch like tigers if that’s the way you
want them: they are a story you tell
about yourself, a story you are journeying
into, that swallows you. You leave
the road, then you honour the logic of ridges
and gorges, of funnels, of slotted
stone chimneys You startle a huge bird
nesting in the riverbed, climbing on slow
cream and ash coloured wings and you follow
as it disappears
inland, you tunnel to the spine of the island
and bury yourself alive, with your possessions, this
curved sky, this whisper of ice-cloud
this magic mountain shutting behind you.
(1985)
Cilla McQueen, ‘Vegetable Garden Poem IV’
(On this side of the house)
On this side of the house
there is no wind
the garden is warm the broccoli
has turned into immense pale yellow
bouquets & the spinach is going
to seed the place zipped through
with cicadas & yellow & white stars
You know words have a lot
to answer for
when the subtle illusion
of meaning slips away
this vegetable
garden released from its designation
becomes a riot of architecture
carrots underground missile sites
thistles explosions cabbages immense
veiny roses
& overhead a creaky whirr
of woodpigeon & bees
homing in on softly blue
sun through short staple
cloud
Now I am listening very carefully
to these new dialects of earth & air
(1984)
Allen Curnow, ‘The Parakeets at Karekare’
The feathers and the colours cry
on a high note which ricochets
off the monologue of the morning sun
the long winded sea, off Paratohi posturing
on a scene waiting to be painted.
Scarlet is a squawk, the green
yelps, yellow is the tightest cord
near snapping, the one high note, a sweet-sour
music not for listening. The end is
less than a step and a wink
away as the parakeet flies.
Darkness and a kind of silence under
the cliff cuts the performance,
a moment’s mixture. Can scavenging
memory help itself?
What do I imagine coloured words
are for, and simple grammatical
realities like, ‘I am walking to the beach’
and ‘I have no idea what the sky can mean
by a twist of windy cloud’?
What’s the distance between us all
as the rosella cries its tricolour
ricochet, the tacit cliff, Paratohi
Rock in bullbacked seas, my walking eye
and a twist of windy cloud?
(1982)
Allen Curnow, ‘You Will Know When You Get There’
Nobody comes up from the sea as late as this
in the day and the season, and nobody else goes down
the last steep kilometre, wet-metalled where
a shower passed shredding the light which keeps
pouring out of its tank in the sky, through summits,
trees, vapours thickening and thinning. Too
credibly by half celestial, the dammed
reservoir up there keeps emptying while the light lasts
over the sea, where it ‘gathers the gold against
it’. The light is bits of crushed rock randomly
glinting underfoot, wetted by the short
shower, and down you go and so in its way does
the sun which gets there first. Boys, two of them,
turn campfirelit faces, a hesitancy to speak
is a hesitancy of the earth rolling back and away
behind this man going down to the sea with a bag
to pick mussels, having an arrangement with the tide,
the ocean to be shallowed three point seven metres,
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-floor shudders.
Down you go alone, so late, into the surge-black fissure.
(1982)
Cabin Fever: The Nineties
This is, in many ways, a more playful section where the real and the fantastic collapse in on one another. Familiar political agendas are suggested slyly rather than insistently and new agendas are presented in novel ways. This is a world which can contain angels as well as cash machines, characters who are immigrant Indian shopkeepers or nineteenth-century French peasants as well as Mormon Māori farmers from the East Cape; it is a world in which historical figures meet and mingle with the inhabitants of the present.
Responses to landscape, always part of the literary from the earliest examples of writing in New Zealand, are here nuanced and knowing, aware of the land’s history and often referring back to the treatment of place in earlier literary works rather than to actual places or settings.
As in earlier sections, local myths continue to be reprocessed and re-presented. Writers display an awareness of the layers and associations of the language they are using, of past writers and the ways in which place, people and experience have been figured in local literary histories, ways that are here respected, modified and transgressed. This means that ideas of what the nation or its people consist of or contain become productively imprecise—New Zealand is a space ship, or a yacht, or even a place to be visited by aliens.
The critical realism of previous generations here becomes a hyper-realism where the intensity of the often urban settings of deprivation and detritus is conveyed by voices and styles that extend and disturb conventional patterns of expression. The voice of the child, familiar from Mansfield and from Frame, is used in a knowing and sometimes disconcerting manner.
The maladies of the late twentieth century are registered in a variety of literary forms. Yet there is also a grounded lyricism apparent in the representa
tions of relationships. The domestic, whether seen through the eyes of a friend, lover or fellow citizen, competes with the public and the ideological—or, rather, produces its own ideology of the everyday.
Floating Nation
Anne French, ‘Cabin Fever’
Three weeks of cyclone weather, and we’re all starting
to get a bit scratchy. From Vancouver my brother writes
that he’s practising for global warming. Rain every day for
weeks. On CBC Stereo they’re predicting a green Christmas;
further east the live Xmas tree companies will be going belly
up. Can you blame them? Here at least I can still get out
and run, even in rain, I tell myself, even in a thirty knot
easterly. Have you noticed the sound of rain on a Moreton
Bay fig, for instance, Captain Fyans? Dry and pellety. Or
the way the black ones grunt and snort as the wind lashes
them, as though they’re alive? See, now that we’re out here,
how it is the tracks in the park fill up first with water,
down there on the edge of the paddock, or up here, on the lawns.
Not that I run this way much, not since the car backed up, and I
took off in the dusk like a rabbit, running towards the light.
Six of them. I’d have had no show. Today I stay clear of the road,
take a note of parked cars and moving ones, and plan my route
towards the houses in case of trouble. From a distance the mutter
of the city rises towards me. Times were simpler, once; given
a length of four by two and some fencing wire a bloke could invent
anything really, art unions, smoko, ladies a plate, all your major
social institutions, race relations included. Sheilas didn’t run,
either—away or for any other reason. So you could say they,
i.e. the jokers in the car, were only trying to reclaim
the recent past using what was near, and served. It all depends
on where you’re looking from. The country viewed from an Air New
Zealand F27 on a misty winter morning, might just resemble a J
boat, very broad in the beam, sailing bravely south away from
Europe and towards the ice, or a waka, small as a room, unstable
in a big swell, blown off course and heading nowhere in particular.
(1990)
Robert Sullivan, from Star Waka
i
Men rest their oars at night –
sailing into paua, plump fowl, sweet
water, miracles of earth, land rolling
from hills into skies, land large enough
for lakes, enough to gather people in,
a feast for a forest of gods hitting sky.
Star waka is a knife through time. Crews
change, language of each crew changes,
as fast as sun burns ground, and tongues curse him.
Crews take longer, yet learn less about makers
of waka, meanings of star. Inheritors
of body, watched by spirits watching star.
Star hangs on ears of night, defining light.
Hear sounds of waka knifing time—aue, again,
what belongs to water belongs to blood. Crews leap aboard
leap out, with songs of relations and care
to send them. Whole families have journeyed here,
they continue the line. The bottom line
is to know where to go—star points.
Kaituki counts stroke. Tohunga,
who dwells beyond law, finds star.
System is always there for waka.
Star rises and falls with night.
So guidance system attached.
Belief system of heart. And tide.
In ancient days navigators sent waka between.
Now, our speakers send us on waka. Their memories,
memory of people in us, invite, spirit,
compel us aboard, to home government, to centre:
Savai‘i, Avaiki, Havaiki, Hawaiiki, from where we peopled
Kiwa’s Great Sea. We left home by a thousand
different stars, but just one waka takes us back.
Let us regroup. We have never travelled further—
just one star stays familiar in the heavens now.
Tamanui sun dribbles from sky. How will we ever settle
this cold place? Makariri. Will our high magic work here?
iv 2140 AD
Waka reaches for stars—mission control clears us for launch
and we are off to check the guidance system
personally. Some gods are Greek to us Polynesians,
who have lost touch with the Aryan mythology,
but we recognise ours and others—Ranginui and his cloak,
and those of us who have seen Fantasia know Diana
and the host of beautiful satyrs and fauns.
We are off to consult with the top boss,
to ask for sovereignty and how to get this
from policy into action back home.
Just then the rocket runs out of fuel—
we didn’t have enough cash for a full tank—
so we drift into an orbit we cannot escape from
until a police escort vessel tows us back
and fines us the equivalent of the fiscal envelope
signed a hundred and fifty years ago.
They confiscate the rocket ship, the only thing
all the iwi agreed to purchase with the last down payment.
v Honda Waka
Today I surrendered the life of my Honda City
to a wrecker in Penrose for $30.
I bought it seven years ago for $6000.
It has rust in the lower sills,
rust around the side windows—
on the WOF inspection sheet it says:
‘this car has bad and a lot of rust …’.
That car took me to Uncle Pat’s tangi in Bluff.
We stopped and gazed at Moeraki,
the dream sky, on the way.
A friend followed us in it on the way
to National Women’s for Temuera’s birth
(we were in her huge Citroen).
We went to Otaki, and Wellington,
in the Honda to visit family.
The Honda took me to Library School
perched next to Victoria Uni.
I drove Grandad across the creek in the Honda at night after the family reunion bash.
Temuera’s first car seat was in the Honda.
That Honda has seen a high percentage
of my poetry.
Now I have left it behind.
xiii Rough Cuts
the strokes slow, start cutting the drink
becalmed by tired arms
billowing at a tangent
we need a flying fox to new land
hook our mast and glide
like our descendants in skies
who have histories
backwards and forwards
our descendants who will secure
discoveries and communicate
to their descendants the value
of wonders they will find
allowing us—the ancestors—
to navigate our history
down lines
46
it is feasible that we will enter
space
colonise planets call our spacecraft waka
perhaps name them after the first fleet
erect marae transport carvers renew stories
with celestial import
establish new forms of verse
free ourselves of the need for politics
and concentrate on beauty
like the release from gravity
orbit an image until it is absorbed
through the layers of skin
spin it
sniff and stroke the obj
ect
become poetic
oh to be in that generation
to write in freefall picking up the tools
our culture has given us
and to let them go again
knowing they won’t hit anyone
just stay up there
no longer subject to peculiarities
of climate the political economies
of powers and powerless
a space waka
rocketing to another orb
singing waiata to the spheres
Waka 74 Sea anchor
In storms the waka would lower
a sea anchor halfway to help control
the vessel. In a way this poem
is a sea anchor. We are waiting
for a storm to pass, one preventing
control of the narrative.
There were other types
of punga (anchors).
A light anchor was used
to determine a current.
And of course there were anchors
to hold the vessel in place.
(1999)
Dylan Horrocks, from Hicksville
[See following pages.]
(1998)
Bill Manhire, ‘Milky Way Bar’
I live at the edge of the universe,
like everybody else. Sometimes I think
congratulations are in order;
I look out at the stars
and my eye merely blinks a little,
my voice settles for a sigh.
But my whole pleasure is the inconspicuous;
I love the unimportant thing.
I go down to the Twilight Arcade
and watch the Martian invaders,
already appalled by our language,
pointing at what they want.
(1991)
The Unpoetic
James Brown, ‘Cashpoint: A Pantoum’
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The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 114