A Belated Review from Michael Morrisey of INTERCOLONIAL by Stephen Oliver,

INTERCOLONIAL by Stephen Oliver, Puriri Press, Auckland (2013)

— reviewed by Michael Morrissey

A transtasman epic

Neither the anguished Janet Frame, at one time our greatest author, nor the seductive James K. Baxter, exhibit the qualities necessary for a Nobel prize candidate – however, one writer i.e. poet does: Stephen Oliver. His only rival is Vincent O’Sullivan, whose work oozes excellence. Either poet could and should be given serious consideration for the grand award. Other writers who might be possible candidates are Lloyd Jones, Owen Marshall and Charlotte Randall.

While O’Sullivan is justly lionised, Oliver has been neglected, overlooked – omitted from anthologies especially ones like the amateurish 150 Essential New Zealand Poems; not invited to Festival events or lesser poetic occasions. The microphone poets do not include him either. He is a prophet without honour in his own country. It is well to remember Van Gogh, commonly regarded as the father of modern painting, sold only one painting in his own lifetime; that F. Scott Fitzgerald had no books in print at the time of his death …

In Oliver’s case, his greatness has been recognised in Australia by such well-known poets as Judith Rodriguez and Nicholas Reid, a former lecturer at the University of Otago, who now lives in Canberra. Why the neglect in New Zealand? Dare it be mooted that Oliver has a larger than life Rabelaisian personality. His robust masculine personality can seem a little overbearing to the conservative politically correct sensibilities than now overwhelmingly dominate our cultural landscape making lively and original art well nigh an impossibility. That Oliver has the build of a grizzly bear does not help. This splendidly atavistic genius is more than sufficient to intimidate your milquetoast feminist at a thousand paces. Every general anthologist who has given Oliver the bum’s rush is guilty of a sin of cultural omission, of poetic murder.

Oliver has published 17 books of poetry ranging from Henwise to the early ’70s to his more sophisticated recent work such as Harmonic, Apocrypha and of course Intercolonial. Each of these three can be considered a masterpiece. In addition, Oliver has probably more frequently published abroad than any other New Zealand poet. Intercolonial explores the historic mercantile link between New Zealand and its great island continent cousin, Australia. The lovely reproduction of the map at the close of the book shows shipping routes from Bluff to Melbourne and Hobart and Auckland; Wellington to Sydney hence the variant synonym transtasman.

These shipping routes are the frame up for Oliver’s extraordinary and brilliant sustained mini epic of 61 pages and approximately 300 blank verse quatrains teeming with chunky historical detail. The stanzas have the pleasant quirk of having a second line “stick out” because of the addition of a couple of extra “beats” or syllables.

Here’s a sample from p42 to showcase Oliver’s skills:

McCormack, swung in the hammock of the sea, dreams:

‘Wave roar’; an elevated floating platform on four

giant, yellow towers. In diameter, greater than boles of giant

eucalypt or columns of Egyptian temples – latticework

of steel armatures—high enough for a ship to pass

safely under. A thousand lights clustered the black, rectangular

fortress. To McCormack it appeared an industrial city,

massive and metalled as a wetback stove rose fifty stories

above waves, a yellow dragon-flame plumed a gantry.

This is faultless, superb poetry – note the muscular syntax, the syntactical confidence, the exact facility, the close observation of the real world, the Curnow-Tennysonian resonances of “the black, rectangular fortress” and the dazzling conclusion, “a yellow dragon flame plumed a gantry.”

The historic-narrative poem, which necessarily requires both acute observation and research, was one of Curnow’s specialities and has also been tackled by Alistair Paterson in his fine poem Africa and by Keith Sinclair and Rob Jackaman. Oliver’s great poem is peppered with the detritus of the nineteenth century – shipwrecks, deportation for petty crime, flogging (for “insolence”) and hangings. Solomon enters the text as a criminal and quickly becomes a hangman dutifully aware of “height, body weight, drop length”. A career in crime, it might be ironically remarked, does sometimes pay. To his credit, as far as possible, Solomon Blay is a humane executioner, like the famous Pierre Pont.

Apart from the current monarchs of O’Sullivan and Oliver there are other talents in the room – Dinah Hawken, Peter Bland, Geoff Cochrane, Jo Thorpe, Chris Price, Tony Beyer, and Michael Harlow.

I’ll conclude by quoting another section from this magnificent poem:

In the rise and fall of air currents, he heard the creak

Of waterwheel—the slow, reassuring rasp of millstones that

Ground out wheatmeal, as his sword blade passed back and forth,

Rhythmically along the stone’s edge, a thin, shearing sound

Over stream and rath, the sky shiny silver, mill-race, mill-pond—

The steady revolution of waterwheel—as his sword blade

Sang against the stone for brightness, and McCormack stepping

On the gangplank of the Ringarooma to disembark at Port

Chalmers, glimpsed in mind’s eye the Irish monarch before

He set his heel firmly upon solid ground for the first time;

The hour lambent, the ship’s screws slowed, the engine reversed.

I rest my case: Stephen Oliver is New Zealand’s greatest living poet.

MICHAEL MORRISSEY is a novelist, short-story writer, poet and anthologist who lives in Auckland. ed by Polygraphia NZ; Memory Gene Pool (poetry chapbook) Cold Hub Press (2012).