Book Review: Tim Metcalf
Two Books by Stephen Oliver
'Deadly
Pollen' 2003 Word Riot Press
ISBN 0-9728200-2-7
30 pages $ 12.00
'Ballads,
Satire and Salt: a Book of Diversions’ 2003
Greywacke Press
ISBN 0 646 42579 X
88 pages $ 18.95
A Lithuanian bison faces us down from
the cover of Stephen’s Oliver’s chapbook 'Deadly Pollen'. The text begins
with a stamp of the hoof:
‘ZIONISM:
to carry forward
the cultural gene-
O bright-lit
destiny of the chosen!
The child’s
bouncing ball lands in mud
on the other
side of the wire…’
The poem moves in 35 measured steps
through the minefield that is the retaliatory politics of our day (contemporary
retaliationships, my partner’s term).From the Middle East, where
Oliver spent some time as a young man, to Bali; from the ambiguous role
of the written word, to the uses of conspiracy and fear; and from a desert
to a spring garden: the narrator moves in 12-15 line stanzas that open
like small puzzles.
In
a cryptic present Oliver tackles the interfaces between war and poetry,
and the line and the language; and finds each as powerful as it is ineffective.
Some sequences shock with exploding bombs in a human landscape, where
‘…The East/ is reliquary; bone splinter and shrapnel/ mixed in daily…’.
In the urban (presumably Sydney) environs, where ‘Doomsday’s a syndicated
affair’ and ‘…Horizon shakes its/ dirty mat over cityscape…’, the populace
is undisturbed by the vicious reality of war. Nevertheless it is not always
sunny:
‘The harbour; its surface serried,
grey disturbances,
Wind grain. Yachts
coasting, canvas
slap….’
One return
in the poem is to nature, ‘the vast chthonic reservoirs’ of Spring and
its many attributions. The Deadly
Pollen is perhaps a cloud that will pass: perhaps it is the swirling
field of chaos, that from time to time finds the wind shaping it into
the face of a contented human being.
There
is violence of the Romper-Stomper variety in Ballads,
Satire and Salt: a Book of Diversions, as in the parody of a German
drinking song ‘Gaudeamus Igitur’. In ‘Uncle Ben’ Oliver’s attack on a
different form of violence amuses then sours like a tartrazine-coated
lolly. Repercussions between adulthood and childhood and between the text
and its footnotes are skilfully established to draw us deep into this
story and its ramifications.
No historian could fail to take notice
of the translation of a 7th Century BC Coptic desert song ‘Come
to Me, Notice Me, Love Me’. It contains lines to humble us yet:
‘Fiercely blooms
the Temple garden,
though Bronze
helmets flash at the gate.’
There are a number of poems that engage
in conversation with 20th century figures: Auden, Dylan Thomas,
Larkin, and the largest poem in the book, a ‘Letter to James K Baxter’,
one of the finest from Oliver’s birthplace, New Zealand. Like the shorter
poems ‘Ballad of the Taj Mahal’ and ‘One night at the Duke c 1969’, the
letter forms a soliloquy on poetry, New Zealand, and the 1960s:
‘The
Big Stone of Respectability
Blocks us in, it’s a mountain to be moved.
Some few have the strength and agility,
Fewer still
know where to find a handhold.
You shoved it free and tightened the
blindfold’
This is counterbalanced by light poems
such as ‘Sydney Bells’ to the tune of ‘Oranges and Lemons’.
The
book is a delight for those who enjoy craftsmanship in poetry. The ‘Keyboard
Cantata’, for example, with its recitative ‘<greymouse caught@play>’,
has the feel of a harpsichord yet achieves the sensitivity of the piano.
The ‘Ballad of Witty Ticcy Ray’ is a metrical joy ride. The pencil drawings
by Matt Ottley, also a musician, respond to the text with something like
a visual acrobatic: imaginative leaps, and drawings that come out at you.
Each is as individual a response to the world as the poem it accompanies.
There
is a striking continuo that reverberates between these two books: the
inclusion in both of a four-page ballad to the sun entitled ‘An Actual
Encounter with the Sun on my Balcony at France Street’. One is instantly
drawn to ponder on the significance of this. Oliver tells us his poem
is the third instalment in a series that began with Mayakovsky’s ‘An Extraordinary
Adventure which happened to Me, Vladimir Mayakovsky, One Summer in the
Country’ from 1920; and Frank O’Hara’s 1958 response ‘A true account of
talking/ to the sun at Fire Island’. After downloading these poems and
drawing up a matrix of comparisons to see where both Oliver and his civilisation
is heading, it dawned on me that perhaps I was like the Mr Whippy man
in Deadly Pollen, an unconscious
piece in a grand poetic game, of which Oliver’s poem is one early move.
The serious and satiric aspects of this work of twenty years is pervaded
with that darkening fin-de-siecle
humour. The sun character for Oliver is a cheerful alter-ego who writes
in a moment of ecstasy at the revelation of the great joke that is the
game itself.
Tim Metcalf
writes and promotes poetry on the Far South Coast of Australia.
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