The winner of this year’s Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry has crafted a shining new collection.
When people of my generation think of Peter Bland, they think first of the actor in the white suit, doing his dodgy conman turn con brio in Ian Mune’s movie Came a Hot Friday. Then they remember what a prolific poet Bland has been, and what an important figure in New Zealand culture. He was co-founder of Downstage Theatre, a vigorous opponent of the “nationalist” pretensions of New Zealand poetry in the 1950s and 60s and a man bringing a unique perspective to Kiwi life because part of him was always an outsider.
Since he first arrived here in 1954, Bland has jumped back and forth between New Zealand and his native England, migrating and remigrating a number of times. He turned 77 this year, has just received the 2011 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry, and Coming Ashore is at least his 14th collection. This raises an obvious question. Are these an old man’s poems?
The answer is equally obvious. If you judge by content and themes then, yes, of course, they’re an old man’s poems. How could they be anything else? But if you judge by pithiness of expression, sharpness of observation and keenness of wit, there’s no hardening of the arteries. These poems are bright as polished glass.
“Somewhere/behind me boats are burning,” says the title poem at the beginning of the volume. Bland knows, however, that boats are never really burnt. They stay lodged in the memory. So there are poems, cheerful but elegiac, like Last Tango in Cuba Street and Early Days, recalling Wellington in the 50s. Others remember bohemian times with old mates like Alistair Campbell, Louis Johnson, James K Baxter, Maurice Shadbolt and Colin McCahon. One group pictures a stay in America, including a visit to a ghost town. Another group recreates an English childhood – fishing (The Pond), staring bored through a window (Classroom 1949) and suffering post-war austerity (In Praise of Silverbeet). Dead parents are evoked with the smell of Dad’s pipe and Mum’s perfume (Parental Ghosts). Old lovers walk again.
But if this sounds cosy, it never is. There’s a grinning skull at the end of many roads. “Coming ashore” could well mean coming ashore to that undiscovered country from whose bourn, etc, etc. Mr Maui, hero of one of Bland’s earlier volumes, appears here readying himself for the goddess of death. In Black Sombrero, we are told that “Death’s/hanging around at noon as usual. He’s/already cleared out all past rooms/and left me to myself.” In Widower, Charon positions himself to ferry the dead to the underworld.
Are we to get solemn about this? I don’t think so. If Bland is almost mystical about life and death, in poems like The Cave it’s only to remind himself that the best approach to mortality is a healthy attitude to life, and an enjoyment of its comforts. The familiarity of snuggling into bed or walking on a pebbled beach with your spouse. The anarchic fun of celebrating life In Dad’s Old Council House with a jaunty nursery rhyme for grown-ups. The satirist and genial piss-taker nudge the reflective chap in many poems.
When poems are as accessible and as much fun as so many of these are, there’s always the temptation to regard the poet as a lightweight and no craftsman. The temptation is easily resisted by readers of Coming Ashore. After the enjoyment of a first reading, a rereading shows the care Bland takes with his imagery and how consistently it runs through the volume. Some poems have a literal littoral, but the shore-side images are also found in poems situated far from the sea, like “the ebb and flow/of the human tide” in the poem celebrating the 40th anniversary of Downstage.
Ten Pound Pom or Kiwi? Part of Bland is still thinking about it and still beached. Maybe the hero of this collection is the dog in Beach Hound who refuses to leave the shore.
COMING ASHORE, by Peter Bland (Steele Roberts, $19.99).
Nicholas Reid is a writer, poet and historian. He guest-edited Poetry New Zealand 41.