Deadly Pollen | Page 5

And he was gone
and I got up to
another beginning, and a day.
Stephen Oliver b. 1950. Grew in Brooklyn-west, Wellington, New
Zealand. One year Magazine Journalism course, Wellington

Polytechnic. Radio NZ Broadcasting School. Casual Radio Actor.
Lived in Paris, Vienna, London, San Francisco, Greece and Israel.
Signed on with the radio ship, 'The Voice of Peace' broadcasting in the
Mediterranean out of Jaffa. Free lanced as production voice,
newsreader, announcer, voice actor, journalist, radio producer, copy
and features writer. Poems widely represented in New Zealand,
Australia, Ireland, USA, UK, South Africa, Canada, etc. Recently
published, Ballads, Satire & Salt - A Book of Diversions, Greywacke
Press, Sydney, 2003. Recently completed a CD of poems and music,
titled: KING HIT Selected Readings - poems written and recorded by
Stephen Oliver with original music by Matt Ottley designed for
international release. He is a transtasman poet and writer who lives in
Sydney.
This book review is included by the request of the author,
and with
permission of Nicholas Reid:
Stephen Oliver Deadly Pollen [Middletown NJ: Word Riot Press, 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