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The
epigraph to Stephen Oliver's new collection, Either Side the Horizon, comes
from Luis Antonio De Villena, and is revealing:
Walking
through the snow of Gothic scents, on the long roads
... amidst
cathedrals and towns of lengthened shadow, goes an
ill-clothed
man with a profound gaze. He has read Ovid, the
Latins and
bestiaries, perhaps drunk every wine on earth.... He
knows that
life is only a strange thread of unconnected things.
The epigraph nicely captures Oliver's sense of the poet's condition: ill
clothed, widely read and deeply embedded in experience but lost in a history
which has neither movement nor end. But where the epigraph continues to
picture the traveller as a blithe spirit, 'happy and drunk', Oliver's
collection speaks more of a malaise which is existential and which becomes a
kind of aesthetic crisis. I'm not sure that Oliver resolves that crisis (I'm
not sure that it can be resolved), but it nonetheless underlies the diverse
and accomplished lyrics in this collection, as what Wordsworth would call a
troubled presence and as what marks a new and interesting point in Oliver's
career.
In part Oliver's is that old story, the mid-life crisis, as he reveals in his
'Letter to Peter Olds:' 'Peter, I guess some might say we are as pieces
removed / from the chess board, out of the main game, set aside' (76). And it
is also a crisis built on doubt, as
the allusion in the following lines suggests: 'Tonight here is Sydney,
/ the moon is rounding out full, (a torch held by an / invisible hand)
tracking the waves ... in sea mist.' For the allusion is surely to Arnold's
'Dover Beach,' and a life in which the sea of faith has withdrawn. The
sources of the malaise here are manifold, for the moon also tracks the waves
across the Tasman from Sydney to Aramoana (actually on the east coast of New
Zealand), marking the poet's transtasman status, a status which is
problematic given the almost complete erasure of literary connection between
the two countries. And if Aramoana is itself a troubled site (site of
loan-gunman massacre in 1990), the moon is also dissolving 'the
telegraph poles / along the beach' in that place, an image which may owe
something to the fishing lights out on the bay in Wallace Stevens' 'Key
West.' What we have here then is an accomplished confessional letter,
confident in its allusions and moving from the poet's past to an unsettled
present, which 'rings through the heart's emptied chambers, that deep /
belling sound as tectonic places shift in the southern ocean.'
Doubt in Oliver comes in part from his 'faithless speculations' (19). In the
powerful apocalyptic poem, 'A Dream Like a Torn Poster,' Oliver, alluding to
the four horsemen, writes of 'The posse out to hunt down / God's kingdom,' of
'hoofbeats' which
... respond to
the plains
like shibboleth
and testing
ground for those who
hear the
coming of the Word.
But if the register here is raised, a hieratic language suitable to the topic,
faith itself is a shibboleth, to be tested. And while retaining the raised
gravity of its language, the poem quickly moves to catachresis (the linking
of violently clashing images within a single metaphor): 'Prayer is a vast
silence that / follows hard upon an auto accident.' Catachresis lies at the
heart of much mid-twentieth century American poetry (Ginsberg's linking of
low and high, of drugs and the divine), and Oliver has frequently explored
catachresis in new and interesting ways in his earlier works. Here, he does
not use it to explode metaphysics (he is no post-modernist), but rather it
marks a point of unsettled disruption. For the same poem goes on to describe:
Dugouts and
trenches in cloudbanks -
a machinegun
nest of lightning busies itself
in one corner
of the sky - empty,
except for
the blazed signature at dawn.
The final lines here are typical of Stevens and Curnow: a moment of confident
rejection (the sky is 'empty') is undercut by a nature which reaffirms itself
boldly in the final line.
Metaphysics thus remains central for Oliver, whose poetry is marked by what
Patricia Prime has called a persistent confrontation with truth, for
emotionally Oliver is caught by what Bellow's Herzog calls 'the fall into the
quotidian' (when, Herzog asks, did this happen?) For while there is no
question of the prayer which is a vast silence being answered through a
species of the via negativa, the poem is also a 'dream'Ńa state in which the
unconscious teases us with a sense of the ineffable. And if the dream trope
figures in many of these poems, so do figures of loss and of a kind of Fall,
a 'curious, utterly dark nostalgia' (36) for a time 'When the world was, in
fact, complete' (26). Oliver's sense of loss derives from his inability to
recapture memories of that time; and hell, he tells us, 'is the absence of
accessible memory.' Memory, which in Oliver's earlier collections has been a
troubled presence in many personalised experiences, here becomes existential.
But the loss nonetheless remains personal. In the poem 'Intersection' Oliver
tells us that 'Exactly what is lost cannot be known' and that 'Loss accretes
over time into mythology.' Those mythologies are of course cultural and
historical, but they are also products of the poet's art, and in speaking of
'The shattering realization of loss' poetry leads to the aesthetic crisis I
spoke of earlier. For poetry is something to which our best and brightest (amongst others) give themselves, and
for which there is plainly very little demand. (Or a demand, at least, which
is subject to the shifting tectonic plates of literary culture). And the
poet's vocation only serves to bring him squarely against the loss of faith
in the kinds of meanings which might give purpose to that vocation. In the
poem 'Submersible,' Oliver asks: 'Breaking the unconscious what do you hear,
/ an exaltation of larks, a host of sparrows?' The brilliant expansiveness of
'exaltation' here is nicely balanced by the bathos of the sparrow, and the
whole is consciously a deeply motivated question.
I hope that the quotations I have given above convey something of the
fineness and mastery of Oliver's craft, for his ear is always perfect in a
collection which ranges in voice from the personal to the hieratic, and from
the prose poem to the finely crafted lyric. For me what is most impressive
about Oliver is his gift for image (freighted, of course, in language), a
genius on display throughout the volume and particularly evident in poems
like 'Enmore / Impasto / 2,' where Oliver speaks of a Sydney of 'terra cotta
roofs, burnt orange, late / afternoon sun giving them weight' (71). But I
have concentrated more on theme or content in this review than I should have,
in part because I wanted to convey something of Oliver's continuing
engagement with the great modernist questions. For Oliver does more than turn
out the perfect lyric: his is a major talent, marked by decades of reading
and a serious attempt to grapple with questions in poetry which are still
live and urgent.
© Nicholas Reid 2006
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