Hone Tuwhare is our greatest poet of praise, and of bewilderment.
One of the hallmarks of Hone Tuwhare in performance was the way he mixed fierce lyrical utterance with a kind of entertaining bewilderment – as if, well, you know, you had to take a stand because life could be so discombobulating. He 
would fumble for his glasses, hunt in a puzzled way for the right book or page, then brilliantly deliver poems like Rain or Hotere, or Heemi – his great conversational lament for James K Baxter. One of the remarkable things about having so many of his poems together in Small Holes in the Silence: Collected Works is that you can see just how many forms that apparent bewilderment takes.
Bewilderment is there in a small child blowing up a balloon, who seems simultaneously to be bringing time and the universe into being; or in a poem like Bus Journey South (“Where have all the/Maori gone, for chrissake?”); or in the sharp synthesis of mischief and anger in his Maori figure cast in bronze:
I mean, how the hell can you welcome
the Overseas Dollar if you can’t open your
mouth
to poke your tongue out, eh?
If the poet remembers hard and troubling times when he was young (in a poem addressed to a girl on her 13th birthday), he quickly finds his way to the life-force that nevertheless sustained him:
But what a good hell it was
to be vulnerable: cry joy alive
to the whip and zip of blood leaping
in the veins.
More often, Tuwhare’s bewilderment takes the form of sheer astonishment. In person, he could always out-Campbell John Campbell on the marvellous/wonderful front, and his poems have the same attitude to the universe. “You must not lose the freshness and/innocence of the child,” he writes in a poem published here for the first time, and it’s advice he himself follows. He wakes freshly to the world on page after page.
He is our greatest poet of praise. If the natural world is there (and it always is), it is to be celebrated. If friends are there, they are to be talked to. If friends and lovers die, their loss is lamented in words of generous tribute. Change itself is a source of delight. The poems are full of shifting textures – sea-tides and river-currents, the sun and moon moving across the sky, wind and rain.
Most of Tuwhare’s published poems are here – and many of his early poems have been translated into Maori, something that would have given him great pleasure. There are about a dozen previously uncollected pieces; otherwise the poems appear as they did in the dozen published books, from No Ordinary Sun (1964) to OOOOOO … !!! (2005). Each book selection opens with a reproduction of the original cover art – so that we see, for example, Ralph Hotere’s “superb orange/circle on a purple thought-base”, the cover for Come Rain Hail. In this case, what the cover can’t supply is the book’s dedication: “To J.” Back in 1970, I could think of at least four women who would have been feeling pleased by that discreet tribute, among them the nun who prompted the poem called Song to a Swinging Contemplative.
It is wonderful (and marvellous, and astonishing) to have all these poems together. One of Tuwhare’s later books was called Shape-Shifter, and as a writer he was a tone-shifter – his phrasings could change pace and texture like wind and light on water. But the quality of his work could come and go, too, especially in his later years. The book I’m most keen to see now is a strongly edited selected poems. Then our astonishment will be beyond all reckoning.
SMALL HOLES IN THE SILENCE: COLLECTED WORKS, by Hone Tuwhare (Godwit, $44.99).
Bill Manhire is director of Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters. His most recent poetry collection, The Victims of Lightning, was released last year.