New Zealand Poetry Society Te Hunga Tito Ruri o Aotearoa
The Word Went Round
The word went round David Howard (Otago University Press, 2006) 64pp, ISBN 9781877372315
Bernard Gadd
The word went round centres on poems to do with New Zealand history, family and friends. The title comes from the major sequence of poems which Howard terms "a pair of dramatic monologues" of a Catholic tenant farming migrating on the ‘Asia' in 1874. A portfolio of striking paintings by Gary Currin literally centres this collection. These sequences are impressive works. The first section's poems zigzag down each page as if crackling with energy. The reading sometimes requires close attention as the man's thoughts shift from Ireland to the vessel to New Zealand. The images are often blunt, uncompromising, entirely apt:
As I spot paradise
ducks above matagouri
my workboots point forward
like a bullock-dray.
The Part 2 poems again are shaped, but this time look more like conventional stanzas, each poem forming a modernistic sonnet. Again there's nothing of the pastoral idyll or of romanticising in these poems:
Stockholm tar saves the snagged lamb
but bluebottle flies blow anything
almost: socks and shoes, blankets
the halo of St Mary in the hall
Here too the narrator's mind follows many thoughts, finds a variety of quotes and allusions. Each sonnet ends with a quote from George Chapman's "Odyssey", an interesting idea, though how germane all the quotes are may be debated. These two sequences make an important contribution to the body of kiwi poetry that looks with clear sight at our past and its people.
Interesting and strong is the small monologue of ‘Te Kooti'. ‘Reiko Kunimatsu's Play house' is a slighter set of poems, but is a warm tribute to a young woman who died aged 24, and this is perhaps a quote from her or apt for her,
Oh this habit of always
existing in places where I don't
live or in a time which is past or is
yet to come
The collection ends with a sequence in tribute to Reginald William Howard 1928-2005, ‘The Held Air', again not as impressive as the first sequences, but as with the Reiko poems, consists of well made, strong poems. I particularly liked
Your carpenter's tape extended
the length of my childhood. Read, then
retracted it wore out the pocket of your jacket
Much of the other poetry is in the manner of the "Wellington Academy", using aspects of modernist, postmodernist and even language poetry: quirky punctuation, truncated or distorted grammar and sentence flow, allusions, quotes, statements that appear to aim at some sort of philosophic or gnomic portentousness ("The utter of the / unoccupied ... try for / ultraviolet: the utter of"), a fondness for shapes and for oddball or would-be striking metaphor ("crazy gates/ weathered like a poeticism"), providing sometimes a sense of playfulness ... except that the devices are so apparent.
Nonetheless, this book as a whole is another collection of well wrought and mature poetry from David Howard, another which libraries should have. A final page or two of notes are provided for the reader.
