Selected Poems

Reviews / Votes

A surprising number of New Zealand poets have found a British readership, notably Allen Curnow, Lauris Edmond, James Baxter, C. K. Stead, Fleur Adcock, and Bill Manhire, the youngest of these. Born in 1946, and for many years a professor in Wellington, Manhire is his country's first Poet Laureate. This selection, originally published by his university, draws chiefly on work from Collected Poems (2001), but it is arranged continuously, so that the individual collections from 1972 onwards are not identified. While this helps us assess his range - beginning with slight, elusive, playful love lyrics, moving to something more satirically surreal, and eventually achieving a poetry which can embrace the big questions with a shrug and a smile - it does mean that there are losses. Manhire's Antarctic poems, for example, which he gathered very effectively as 'Field Notes' in the Collected, represent some of his best writing, and only a few are included here.

Manhire enjoys blurring the edges of meaning, and while poems such as 'The Victims of Lightning' reveal themselves at first reading, others offer little guidance as to how way leads on to way. We are left to catch what we can through the tone, the grammatical undercurrents, or even (in 'Water, a Stopping Place') what the poet has deliberately omitted: 'It is late // to be changing the topic of a conversation / but she is searching for a word, / something to tell him why he something huge // about devotion...'. Several poems take as their main focus particular words ('varmint', 'jalopy') or hinge on etymology or a pun. Sometimes conceits can be easily unriddled. But Manhire is unpredictable, unafraid to kick against his own ideas, most whimsical when he touches on the darkest areas. He is also happy to leave us to guess the full story, or his feelings about that story, resisting the temptation to exploit rich resources in sensitive areas. In 'The English Teacher', he begs his mother to 'Give me more detail.... You know, to put in the poem', but all she can say, all he can give us, is 'it was lovely'.

'An Outline' is characteristic: a still life into which life is instilled by the artful, cinematically attentive poet. Coolly, Manhire captures the oddness and ordinariness of existence, eradicating descriptive colour, tracing a labyrinthine dream scenario, learned perhaps on Curnow's Lone Kauri Road. Although elsewhere he deploys rhyme for satirical, epigrammatical or (later) nostalgic effects, Manhire generally avoids traditional metres (though 'Death of a Poet', one or two poems for Charles Causley, almost replicates the ballad form which Causley made his own); but he likes to bring a primitive quality to his verse with anaphora and a directness that smacks of the earliest English poetry. He agrees with Yeats about 'walking naked' (there is a good deal of nakedness), and reaches repeatedly for elementals - snow, stars, bones, door, window, cave, the moon. Much as there is to admire in the longer sequences, 'Brazil' and 'Opoutere', the seventeen lines of 'Moonlight' - dedicated to 'Katie Gray (1975-1991)' - show how movingly effective such restraint can be. Like an artist who only draws the essential lines (as in Ralph Hotere's cover portrait of the poet), Manhire never explains to us the precise importance of 'occasional Kate' to him, yet convinces us that she mattered as 'with a big sigh / she appears in the sky', adding details of 'her mother's lullaby step' and the seated father 'deep in the forest, and concluding:

I hear myself saying

please and please and please;

I want to go back

to the start of the nineties.

Sleepless night, big almond eyes,

and a hand rocks a pram in the passage;

from somewhere a long way

outside of our houses

the moon sends its light to this page.