Alan
Riach introduces Bill Manhire
'Kevin', the closing poem from Bill Manhire's
collection Lifted, caught me the moment I read it in December
2007, when I was browsing in a bookshop in the northland town of
Whangarei.
I bought the book on the strength of that poem alone, though Manhire
has been writing good poems for a long time now and a number of
them reflect on his Scottish ancestry – his Mum once told
me she was sorry he'd lost his Scots accent as a wee boy when he
went to school! Poems like 'A Scottish Bride' (from Zoetropes)
seem oblique and unassertive, yet there are lines which seem to
come from a pre-aeroplane, pre-internet world, where the distance
meant years, and loneliness might enter the character.
You cannot imagine, halfway
across the world, her father wrote,
the sorrow of the undersigned…
There's a similar poignancy in 'Kevin' but typically for Manhire,
it hinges on a lightness of touch and gentle humour, what we Scots
might call a 'reductive idiom' – except that there's a sad,
sympathetic smile in it, rather than bitter protest.
'Kevin' is a poem with universal application – it's about
mortality, an attempt to explain to a young person what it means
when you die: where do you go to? What happens to your voice? Where
might someone meet you again? How can we reconnect, remember, bring
you back?
Unlike older New Zealand poets James K. Baxter and Allen Curnow,
who might have offered bardic comment, vatic irony or lyrical depiction
of lonely figures in the New Zealand landscape, Manhire's poem
is almost all internal, a voice speaking quietly, almost apologetically.
The only location imagined here might be a sitting-room with a
big dark radio, the kind of thing that would have been brought
to New Zealand from Europe, emerging from that historical colonial
past into a contemporary world where new technologies prevail.
Radio works now in the mass media world of internet and worldwide
web, strafing commercialism and heartless advertising – not
just good music but 'some terrible breakfast show'. Yet the voices
you hear can sometimes still come from an older, more distant world.
And despite the particularities of that imagined radio, it is
after all a metaphor, an attempt to suggest what connection might
come from the past, across time, languages, ideologies, geographies,
to anyone now, and to anyone yet to come. The element of uncertainty
in that evocation – you just don't know what you're going
to hear – is beautifully caught. It's serious, humbling,
unsentimental and perhaps fearful. The love that inheres in the
words 'mothers and fathers' equally implies the mortality that
connects generation to generation, the debt each generation owes
to the earth that never really lets us leave.
The poem works through its steadiness of tone, beginning with
a compassionate yet honest ignorance: the first admission is 'I
don't know…' The imagery suggests the shelter people have
looked for from prehistoric time – 'the cave' – to
the business of living socially, so much with others: life resembles
'the hive'. Maybe the repeated 'v' sound in the last line of the
first verse-paragraph suggests the e'quiet hum of an old radio.
By contrast, the repeated internal rhymes, 'go…' 'I know…'
'the heavy radio…' and the end-rhymes in the last verse-paragraph
that repeat these sounds: '…know' '…go' and '…the
radio' – these end in open-ended vowels, which fade off into
silence. The poem asks to be read aloud. All these sounds work
together to create a pattern that very carefully represents the
connectedness I've noted, while it makes an implicit statement
about vulnerability and the absolute loneliness of all living things.
I stress that implicit. There is nothing overt or exclamatory in
any of this.
It is frightening that anyone might be suddenly 'lifted' (that
heart-in-the-mouth moment when you're stopped by the police for
whatever reason, that turns you into a wee boy once again, whatever
age you are). There is perhaps the idea of a child 'lifted' and
disappearing, the news coming through on a 'terrible' breakfast
programme. Yet the image also evokes the pleasurable feeling of
a child being lifted up by a parent or grandparent, carried tenderly,
or hoisted to a higher vantage-point. Anyone might remember such
a moment from childhood.
What makes the poem enduring for me is the first word of the second
verse-paragraph: music. What it's about is something to do with
music, the old questions still with us in the new time, the certainty
that we all burn our comfort, 'surely to keep alive'
Bill Manhire
Kevin
I don't know where the dead go, Kevin.
The one far place I know
is inside the heavy radio. If I listen late at night,
there's that dark, celestial glow,
heaviness of the cave, the hive.
Music. Someone warms his hands at the fire,
breaking off the arms of chairs,
breaking the brute bodies of beds, burning his comfort
surely to keep alive. Soon he can hardly see,
and so, quietly, he listens: then someone lifts him
and it's some terrible breakfast show.
There are mothers and fathers, Kevin, whom we barely know.
They lift us. Eventually we all shall go
into the dark furniture of the radio.
About Bill
Manhire
 Bill
Manhire was born in Invercargill in 1946. His mother was an Edinburgh
high school teacher who married a New Zealand sailor during the
Second World War, and so one day found herself a publican's wife
in New Zealand's far south. Manhire – who still has cousins
in Hugh MacDiarmid's home town, Langholm – grew up in small
pubs in Otago and Southland, and was educated at the Universities
of Otago and London, where he did postgraduate research in Old
Norse. He is director of the 30-year-old creative writing programme
at Victoria University of Wellington. His books include a Collected
Poems and, most recently, Lifted (published in the
UK by Carcanet, in New Zealand by Victoria University Press). He
has also published volumes of short stories, and has edited anthologies
of poetry and short fiction, including most recently The Wide
White Page: Writers Imagine Antarctica.
Titles
available from SPL
Sheet Music: poems 1967-1982 (Wellington: Victoria University
Press, 1996)
My Sunshine (Wellington: Victoria University Press,
1996)
Lifted (Manchester: Carcanet, 2007)
Related
links
International Institute of Modern Letters
New Zealand Book Council
New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre
The Brain of Katherine Mansfield - hypertext version
Best New Zealand Poems
Victoria University Press
Carcanet Press
About
Alan Riach
 Alan
Riach went to New Zealand in 1986 on a one-year post-doctoral fellowship
and returned to Scotland fourteen years later, married to a New
Zealander, with two sons, each with dual nationality. At the University
of Waikato in Hamilton, he was appointed lecturer, Associate Professor
and finally Pro-Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences,
before leaving to take up the Chair of Scottish Literature at Glasgow
University. He is the general editor of the Collected Works of
Hugh MacDiarmid and the author of Representing Scotland in
Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography (Palgrave Macmillan,
2005). His fourth book of poems, Clearances (2001), follows First & Last
Songs (1995), An Open Return (1991) and This
Folding Map (1990).
Related
links
The
Good of the Arts
Alan Riach's radio series, first broadcast in New Zealand 2001. |
|
