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by Paula Green

Award-winning author and editor of 25 books, Owen Marshall is both a poet and fiction writer. He is considered one of the most significant writers of short stories in New Zealand. He received the 2013 Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction, and was awarded an Honourary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Canterbury where he is an adjunct professor. Owen’s poetry reflects a deft and economical eye that catches luminous detail. His poems are steered by love as much as keen intelligence as they travel from everyday experience to an eclectic reading history to contemplative moments.

To mark the arrival of his third poetry collection, The White Clock (Otago University Press, 2014), Owen kindly agreed to be interviewed by NZ Poetry Shelf. I will review this new collection shortly.

1- Have reading and writing always been important to you?
My father was a lover of books, and he read to us as children, mainly from such authors as Kipling, Dickens, Galsworthy,  Conan Doyle and the lake poets.  He was also a devoted walker and loved the outdoors.  I was open to both enthusiasms.  Although a  keen reader I made few attempts to write until I had finished university study.

2- What poets have influenced you?
I have  enjoyed reading poetry since my teens, but began writing it comparatively recently and without systematic study.  Early haphazard reading included the usual suspects – Housman, Auden, Eliot, Dickinson,  Bishop, Yeats, Frost, Hughes and Dylan Thomas.  I  was drawn to the lyrical qualities of Laurie Lee, which are evident in his prose as well as his poetry.  I much admired Jane Austen’s epigrammatic precision which may be so effectively used in poetry.  When in my twenties I was stunned by Henry Reed’s wonderful poem, ‘The Naming of Parts,’ and it remains a favourite.  More recent influences are people like Paul Muldoon and Gary Soto.  James K Baxter is the leading New Zealand poet for me, despite the unevenness of his work. Among many others  I admire are Vincent O’Sullivan, Brian Turner, Bill Manhire, C.K. Stead, Michael Harlow, Fiona Kidman, Lauris Edmond, Frankie McMillan, and Fiona Farrell.  There are many more.

3 – In my Herald review of your collection, Sleepwalking in Antarctica, I suggested your poems were `an exquisite marriage of musicality, observation, elegance and economy.’  What are the key things for you when you write a poem?
I hope for emotional intensity.  Word play may be attractive, maybe even dazzling, but eventually it palls for me if not in the service of something sincerely felt.  When I read I want to find out more about how others find the business of living to be.   Wordsworth’s definition of poetry has become a cliché, but `emotion recollected in tranquility’ still takes some beating.  Humour and satire are attractive in poetry, and of course cadence, insight and originality.

4 – Has your writing changed over time?
I hope that my writing has become more assured, but the work always twists in the hand and never matches the artistic intention.  In the end you write as you can rather than as you wish.  No doubt an evolution is discernible in my fiction, but all the poetry I have published is comparatively recent.  I do feel however that it continues to free up, and increasingly I feel comfortable with using the vernacular.

Full interview

Paula Green is a poet, children's author, reviewer and anthologist living on Auckland's West Coast.