Michael Schmidt introduces Gregory O'Brien
Greg O'Brien's Days by Water was published by Carcanet in 1994. Revisiting it, I am again moved by a quality that affected me when I first read his work, a quality the poems share with Greg's graphic and critical work: resolute proportionality.
The illuminations which flow from his language, his images, and those works in which he harmonises the two (I think in particular of a picture poem called ‘Beausoleil' that he made at Menton and sent me as a gift, which now watches over the writing of this piece) remain serviceable. His poems are not confessional, are not conventional poems of witness, ‘I saw this, I saw that'. They realise experiences, delivering them to the reader. They are enactive, the poet in a Keatsian spirit allowing the poem to become.
The proportionality of the verse entails an appropriateness and adequacy of diction and metaphor, of lineation and extent; and most particularly an avoidance of those ironies which are the tools of many of the poet's contemporaries, who cut too large a piece of cloth and then wryly scissor away at it, so that our experience of the poem is that of a poet undertaking a process of reduction, the poet in action rather than the poem, tailor rather than weaver.
The piece I have chosen to look at is the last poem in Days by Water. It follows as an after-tremor the ‘Finale' of the sequence ‘Claudio Monteverdi'. It is entitled ‘C.M.'s son:' and the colon belongs to the title since the poet is delivering the son's testimony. The sequence has been formally diverse: stanzaed poetry, prose, free verse, dramatic monologue: a generic indeterminacy appropriate to the evolving theme and the invented narrative.
The punctuation is correct until the last six lines which are tentative, reflective, informal. It is clear that the son is figuring the father, his death, its consequence, a kind of Telemachus, but also a creator. The father falls, not like Lucifer, out of heaven, but out of a dream or an imagination which he has inhabited, much as a poem might fall out of a dream. The dream and the lighthouse are identified: specifically the eye of the lighthouse, with its seeing sweep or rather its sweep that allows seeing. But the C.M. figure is not released. His death imagines him, as his imagined son does. His son is at once his death and the imagination of him. The speaker of this little poem insists on the literal nature of the metaphor, the reality of the lighthouse, of its function and permanence. His years take the form of the sweeping light, seeing, being seen, informing, enabling safe passage.
Yet the figure of the unknown father has taken hold not of his imagination but of his memory, which occasions the tentative closing lines in their resigned sense of poverty. This is how the sequence of poems that precedes the son's testimony functions. The experience that is proportionately imagined becomes memory—a personal memory, so that the imagined son, the imagining poet and the reader have shared an experience that is in texture and in effect real.
Gregory O'Brien
C.M.'s son:
‘My father fell, as out of a dream
from the eye of a lighthouse.
That was how his death
imagined him.
And I, who never met him
watch the beacon which still
guides the night-ships
safely past. And this is the form
my years take. But why should
someone I never knew
take hold of my memory?
Some days are bad
others better
some days seem only
to happen
somewhere beyond
the rockstrewn hills.'
About Gregory O'Brien
 Gregory O'Brien (born Matamata, New Zealand, 1961) is a Wellington-based poet, essayist, painter and art curator. He has edited numerous anthologies and art catalogues, and written extensively about New Zealand culture. He has published two books introducing the country's visual arts to a younger generation, Welcome to the South Seas (AUP, 2004) and Back and Beyond (AUP, 2008). His book of essays on New Zealand arts and letters, After Bathing at Baxter's, appeared in 2002 and was followed by a book-length essay about the antipodes and Southern France, News of the Swimmer Reaches Shore (Carcanet/VUP, 2007). O'Brien was a guest at the Poetry International Festival, Rotterdam, in 2005 and his poems were the basis for a range of clothes from Auckland-based fashion designer Doris Du Pont the following year.
Titles
available from SPL
Days Beside Water (Auckland: AUP, 1993; Manchester: Carcanet, 1994)
Winter I Was (Wellington: VUP, 1999)
Afternoon of an Evening Train (Wellington: VUP, 2005)
My heart goes swimming: New Zealand love poems, edited by Jenny Bornholdt and Gregory O'Brien (Auckland: Godwit, 1996)
Related
links
New Zealand Books Council
Bowen Galleries, Wellington
Carcanet Press
Victoria University Press
About
Michael Schmidt
 Michael Schmidt was born in Mexico in 1947. He studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford. He is Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University, where he is convenor of the Creative Writing programme. He is a founder (1969) and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press Limited – which has a strong Scottish list and a developing New Zealand list -and a founder (1972) and general editor of PN Review . He has written poetry, fiction and literary history, and is a translator and anthologist. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he received an OBE in 2006 for services to poetry.
Related
links
British Council contemporary writers
Carcanet Press
Michael Schmidt's website
|
|
