Introduction to New Zealand Poetry (M. David)

 

Introduction to New Zealand Poetry

-        M. David

 

Introduction:

New Zealand’s poetry is as diverse as its geography, echoing the voices of both the indigenous Māori and the settlers. Poets like Hone Tuwhare and Katherine Mansfield portray the raw beauty of the land, the struggle of its people, and the mingling of cultures. Their works often imbibe elements of the Kiwi spirit – exploratory, resilient, and intimate with nature. The poems, whether steeped in tradition or breaking new ground, paint a rich picture of New Zealand’s literary landscape.

 

Discussion:

New Zealand poetry faced in the early years of its formative period precisely the same problems as the other colonies of the British Empire – imitativeness and derivativeness in the creative act. This was true of New Zealand’s best known writer Katherine Mansfield though later in her career she acquired the maturity and the self-confidence to protest thar whatever she lived she wrote with New Zealand in her bones.

 

Another less known writer, Miss Robin Hyde is also a woman. It seems that she left her  country to realize while working on the sources of Ne Zealand history.  While she was in abroad, she took a pride of saying that she was a New Zealander. She wrote, “it’s just dawned on me that I’m a New Zealander and surely, surely, the legends of the mountains, rivers and people that we see about us should mean more to us than the legends of any country on earth”. It is good to remember Santayana’s observation that man’s native country is “a kind of second body” and so his writing must be said to be mediated through this second body with all its inherent limitations.

How far is such a view responsible for the customary attempt to identify Katherine Mansfield with New Zealand rather than with its literature? For it might well mean she has no distinguished predecessors and, for a long time, has not contemporaries or successors of her own stature, she stands alone.

Allen Curnow, one of New Zealand’s most important poets, is aware that “depressingly derivative, manneristic and spiritless verse coming out of New Zealand”. He is aid to have once observed that you could not write literature, you could not paint art. Which means one has to love and lived experience must get written or painted. What Curnow meant was “poet should not look out for poetical subjects.” He contends that ‘everyone is somebody, and no one is anybody. If universally anything, they are universally dull.

There are only three poets namely James K Baxter, Kendrik Smithyman and C.K. Stead from whom one ca expect new work of originality and distinction. Even Baxter, has ceased to have contact with his base since “The Fallen House”, his 1953 volume. His much-praised Indian poems in Howrah Bridge record a visit, hardly a departure. Of Smithyman’s verse he speaks in the extended metaphor of a pilot. He is close to the ground where half the delight is in the fatality of any slip, but his “lower flying is true art, both to the vision of this place and poetic instruments of the air age.” Curnow thinks that while Stead has talent, he has not made a difference yet to one’s view of New Zealand poetry. This remark was made by him in the early seventies and judging by the published volumes of verse from that country it largely holds good even today.

It the very perspective mind that sees the problem in overwriting, in verbiage. One wonders if it is of the Indian poetic scene or his own country’s. Curnow himself brings together what he calls ‘reason’s range’ and ‘green innocence of nerves’ because he sees a kinship between the Indian and New Zealandian life and therefore makes poetry out of such a union. Consider his poem “Sailing or Drowning” – it is the “green myth” which connects the past and the present making “the evening and the morning one”. New Zealand is seen by some as “Landfall in unknown seas” but Curnow thinks that “Simply by sailing in a new direction, you could enlarge the world.” Like many other poets in the Western tradition Curnow believes the “Fall was “fortunate” for only those who can re-make the world. This is the central idea of his poem, “Elegy on my Father”

While Curnow treats in his poems of his “common inheritance and a common cause” with all his possible “faithful memory”, he is careful enough not to elevate the individual by identifying him with the society. Or linking the national past with the individual present. But such an attempt his poems suffer risk of jingoism. Nevertheless, Curnow’s poems are rather more personal documents than what makes New Zealand literature and it seems to affirm the truth of the ambivalence assumption to an outsider. He who has had a glimpse of the wonders that can afford the luxury of self-criticism. While encourages one to wait and watch the new efforts that come from New Zealand for even Maori writing has shown some promise of what can come out of that country.

Conclusion:

New Zealand’s first poets writing in English arrived in the mid-19th century, and tried to find ways of writing about their new land. Their efforts were generally derided by later generations, who preferred modernism to Victorianism. In the 2010s New Zealand’s poets were more diverse than in the past, with more women, Māori and Pacific poets being published.