Otago Daily Times - By Shawn McAvinue on Fri, 28 Mar 2014
At the 'The White Clock' book launch at the University Book Shop last night are (from left) poet Owen Marshall, of Timaru, artist Grahame Sydney, of St Bathans, and New Zealand poet laureate Vincent O'Sullivan, of Dunedin. Photo by Peter McIntosh.
Mr Marshall said a book launch emphasised the paradoxes of literature.
''It is the most selfish, personal and isolating thing - definitely not a team sport - but on the other hand, to produce a worthwhile and publishable book requires the support and expertise of many other people.''
Mr Marshall thanked artist Grahame Sydney for providing the painting Ida Valley Moon for the book cover and Otago University Press publisher Rachel Scott for agreeing to publish his collection without previewing any poems.
Ms Scott said The White Clock was ''alive with the vivid particulars of damp duffel coats and hot air balloons, beer and bicycles, willows and skylarks, kauri gum and limestone tunnels''.
New Zealand poet laureate Vincent O'Sullivan said Mr Marshall's work was full of wit, tolerance and compassion and made good straight forward sense.
''What I admire is his gift of utter simplicity,'' Mr O'Sullivan said.
And here in Vincent O'Sullivan's address:
The American
novelist Philip Roth has said that to expect poets and fiction writers to
have something
in common is to confuse jockeys with locomotive drivers. I also expect that a writer like Owen who
does both would rather we talk about just one or the other, but not both at the
same time. For a moment at least I’ll risk irritating him. Some years ago I
wrote that there were aspects to his fiction that I preferred to those of any
other New Zealand writer. I still do. And in saying that I used a very unfashionable
word in critical assessment. I said in reading Marshall, there was always a
sense of moral commitment, and part of the literary excitement in reading him,was
that this was inseparable from aesthetic choices. He wrote as a man with an
unusually sharp eye to what mattered to society, as well as the instincts of an
artist preoccupied with language and form.
I think something not so dissimilar about
his poetry, and an additional reason why I admire it, has to do with that
massively important word, independent. This may even seem an obvious point to
labour, but in the tangled web of New Zealand poetry and its reception, I don’t
think it is. Marshall, it seems to me, has always written at something of an
angle to cliques and fashions. When I read him, as a poet or as a storyteller,
I think of Chekov saying how a writer has no choice but to move as a loner, and
not graze in herds. I think of Mansfield telling a fellow writer late in her
life, how much time one could waste tedworrying about what other people were
doing, when all that interested now, as she said, was ‘what my Aunt Fan is
doing in Tinakori Road.’ Owen Marshall never needed that advice. When I first
saw the advertisements for the last dwarf-chopping Hobbit movie, The Desolation of Smaug,I misread it for
a moment and thought why is Peter Jackson making a film about the literary
shires of Middle Earth, called the Desolation
of Smug. Marshall, for one, would not have been in the cast. As the
solitary traveller, he strikes me as exemplary.
We all know, of course, that poetry, as much
as brewing or rugby, is able to accommodate a broad range of tastes and front
row tactics, and one may be as valid as another. I hope I’m not starting to
sound like a superannuated academic if I
say that to me, Marshall is in that tradition whose high points are poets like
Auden and Graves, writers who don’t hold much brief for flashiness, because
they want to speak directly to others in the way they speak to themselves,
poetry of which the least we expect, as Graves said, is that it makes good
straightforward sense. It is poetry that talks about what we have in common,
with its impulse to sharing that common voice when we speak of our own experience.
Poetry that when it says ‘I’, hopes that the reader will be happy to take that
as ‘we’.
It was no surprise to find here a poem about
a ring Owen wears with a Roman coin depicting a Roman emperor – not a particularly
famous one, a person who had all sorts of failings, but was courageous and
generous and very much his own man. Owen’s poetry seems to me to have a lot in
common with the Roman stoic tradition, with its touchstones of measure,
communal concern, personal probity, good humour. In other words, poetry that carries
the values of the man who writes it.
Allen Curnow once said poetry is what we do
when we are preoccupied with something else. It was a shrewd thing to say.
Poetry that is preoccupied only with itself is likely to wear thin; poetry
which conveys what enduringly interests
or puzzles or challenges us, is something altogether tougher, less
self-regarding - two qualities high on my list when thinking of Marshall. As is
witty, tolerant, compassionate, unhurried. It is, if you like, the poetry of
inscription as much as chance statement – the distillation of what experience
adds up to, whether its love poems or
remembering the army or watching grandchildren or piercing pretentions. That is
something he is also very good at, with that needle eye of the experienced
master who knows almost by instinct who deserves detention, or even, as in the
good old days, a sound thrashing.
What I admire too is his gift for utter
simplicity, that rare crystalline sense of considered pause, and the wisdom of
time: as when he writes,
When all is silent on the hill
and you stand absolutely still,
to watch a frozen world, some
times your spirit leaves your
body, rises through air cold
as spring water to a far surface,
looks down on you, diminished,
motionless, but not unhappy
much
as you will be in death.
A poem which is
a single sentence, a perfectly pared back intuition, a deeply personal
statement, yet as un-self-displaying as you might get. It is the kind of thing
many of these pages give you – a private moment, finding its way to becoming a
poetic event. It can be done, as here, with great economy; or expansively,
wittily, in a poem like ‘Common Knowledge’.
There’s a German poet who wrote the
excellent advice to other poets, ‘Be sand not oil in the machinery of the world.’
It’s a catch cry really to snooker complacency, to shy off from striking a
pose, even to turning a deaf ear, dare I say, to our academic boundary riders.
In my view, for all his adroitness, Owen has cart-loads of sand. In what he
wants to do with poetry, it’s a truly personal road he has opted for – but as
you see on this exquisite cover by Grahame Sydney, it’s a road with something at
its end you’re not likely to get anywhere else.
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