Deadly Pollen | Page 5

2003]; and Ballads, Satire & Salt [Sydney: Greywacke Press, 2003]. Review by Nicholas Reid. First Appeared: JAS Review of Books.
Stephen Oliver's anthology of 2001, Night of Warehouses, brought together the work of a poet who combines an astonishing facility for image with a complete assurance of voice, while showing a deep engagement with the poetic tradition . Two new collections, Ballads, Satire & Salt and Deadly Pollen, will do much to extend that reputation. The former is subtitled 'A Book of Diversions' and displays Oliver's sardonic wit and verbal inventiveness, along with a fine set of illustrations by Matt Ottley. The book's light verse moves from political satire ('Think Big') to a series of reflections on the poets of this and the last generation, ranging from Larkin and Auden to the major figures in recent New Zealand writing. Wit explained is wit ruined, however, and so I shall not comment at length on what is an impressive work.
Oliver's other new collection, Deadly Pollen, is an ambitious undertaking - a meditation, in large measure, on Wallace Stevens and his legacy - and brings together thirty-five short lyrics into a loosely linked sequence which examines the state of the world after 9/11. And the poem is not 'merely' political, for it diagnoses a state of spiritual malaise based on fear, a state of crisis in which the role of the poet is in question. So far, so good. But if this is a crisis poem, it is also a crisis in which (and this is my reservation) I find it difficult to believe, though it has been the subject of much recent American commentary. And in any case, there is also an enormous amount to admire in the language and in the range of reference.
I can convey something of the fineness of Oliver's craftsmanship in his translation of Horace's 'Pyrrha' ode, a translation which fits into Oliver's theme of disillusionment, and of his modernist distrust of beauty in person and in diction. The quiet intensity, and the distanced, almost intellectualized sensuality, of the language in which Oliver brings alive the golden-haired Pyrrha, Horace's femme fatale, is perfect:
Pyrrha, your dewy hair,?yellow, scented, doubly wreathed?in Jasmine, fresh from the trellis?this morning.... (lyric 12)
Nor is Oliver's ambition here as limited as it might seem, for in taking on such a translation Oliver is setting himself up against a history of translations, and most notably one by Milton. It is a challenge in which he succeeds admirably. And in the later lines of the lyric, Oliver marks his disengagement by a withdrawal into a more demotic register. For while he is adept at finding occasion for the lyrical richness of which modernism was always suspicious, he also writes at times in a spare modern voice, as in the following lines which may owe something to the New Zealand poet Curnow's 'Canto of Signs':
Rubbed off sky exposes an?undercoat of white that is really?fuzzed, mid-day heat. Birds?change over shifts. Things settle.?Shadow drops under eaves, tier?by tier .... (lyric 32)
The language here has a powerful antipodean flatness, and depends on its laconic pauses. And if 'things settle', it is because, as the allusion to Yeats suggests, things are about to fall apart; and we move to images of Bali. Oliver goes on in a following lyric to demonstrate his gift for image, in his intense visualization of Spring's strange bloom, the terrorist's bomb:
Compression of bees,?shrub-shaped, in proton loops,?on cushioned air. Spring!?See the counter, its bright ticking?with fail-safe growth. (lyric 34)
Political poets do not always manage to capture so well the estrangement which is necessary for successful social comment.
Similarly, Oliver demonstrates an unsettled verbal mastery in a bravura display, a description of architectural form:
... Complex of?accented runs, angles, drops, sluices,?pumps, ditches, endless unbowed?archways... (lyric 11)
The language here is finely controlled, from the way in which the 'x' sound is perfectly balanced in the opening phrase, to the series of falling monosyllables which are released in the enjambed expansiveness of the final phrase with its open vowels. The language is reminiscent of Les Murray's 'Bent Water' (surely Murray's masterpiece). But the lines I have just quoted continue in rhythms which, while still lyrical, are also more unsettling: 'archways, treatment ponds breaking into/sunlight'. For where Murray's language embodies a confident belief in God, Oliver's has been a celebration of a public sewer - and more to the point, a sewer envisioned but (in an act of creative failure) never built.
Late in the poem, Oliver brings together these themes in a grim reflection upon the role of the poet - in a voice in which the emotion is italicized but never allowed to run outside its bounds:
One quadrant of sky turns,?face up, black as the ace of spades.?Much as a God can manage?muttering from the side of his mouth.?Star flecks, nova spittle. Rage