Books
Deep South
by Mark Houlahan
Incontinents is Richard Reeves’ third poetry collection. In it, he continues what WB Yeats called the “fascination of what’s difficult”. His poems are intriguing but not beguiling. They don’t have the oomph of the performance poem, or the charm of poems designed to go over well at writers’ festivals. And yet they are excellent, well worth rereading for their dark matter.
Reeves has two main preoccupations: the power of traditional poetic forms and the power of New Zealand landscapes. He is a Dunedin poet, and writes evocatively around Otago’s terrain.
He invites readers to get lost in time and in poetry. “The stones themselves breathe age; no metaphor/Would entertain the nothing which they seek,” he writes in the opening Proem, where “More powerful than any love, the land moves”. Reeves knows he can only gesture beyond metaphor in metaphors, invoking here the Romantic-era philosophical landscape poem, as well as other “poems” (such as King Lear) where nothing is a “something”.
If that sounds too abstract for comfort, Reeves means that, too. But it’s not too abstract for pleasure. Here the thoughts are encased in driving blank verse couplets: “The planes guide past, inside them silent apes;/Each peers across the vast land as in dream.” Reeves picks up the landscape at the end of the collection, with Seven Songs for Islands. Again, he celebrates a southern land, and shows his virtuosity with rocking six-syllable lines, with a heavy beat in each half of the line: “Sunshine, salt and sleet/mould lava into grime.” Such effects are for the reading eye, but may make you want to rise up and sing them aloud.
Perhaps the central poem is Formalist MP Confesses, written, as Reeves tells us, in ottava rima, four couplets per stanza, the form Lord Byron used so well for serious and satiric purposes. The confessing MP is not Reeves directly, but the oppositions define his territory. On the one hand, “Beauty is truth”. On the other, as WH Auden puts it, poetry makes nothing happen. Thus, the MP despairs: “The day is gone when verse contested war,/The killing sprees go on throughout Darfur.”
Reeves cannot answer the riddles he poses, although he looks through history and poetic form for solutions, as in the sombre sequence The Occupation of Tiberius, Petrarchan sonnets set around Rome’s second emperor. He seems likely to keep asking powerful, eloquent questions for many collections to come.
INCONTINENTS, by Richard Reeves (AUP, $24.99).
