Blue of sea and sky and distance, and white vaporous cloud. Light in Auckland dominates, penetrates, suffuses, as nowhere else in New Zealand; it envelops earth and trees, buildings, people, in a liquid air which at any moment might dissolve them into itself. Land and its solids are there only a condition, changing all the time, of water, air, light.- Charles Brasch. Indirections: A Memoir 1909-1947 (Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1980): 180.
The other day I took a drive out to Stokes Point in Northcote, a little reserve nestled under the pylons of the Auckland Harbour Bridge. It's a strange place: half building site, half architecturally designed park. It does, however, offer a marvellous view of the city.
A few years ago I was asked to assist with finding suitable texts to inscribe on the concrete pillars which hold up the underpinnings of the bridge. It was a somewhat vexed project (which you can read about here), but in the end most of the choices I offered - texts by prominent North Shore authors - did indeed end up getting plastered onto the stonework in question.
So if you want to encounter the "blue of sea and sky and distance" Charles Brasch described as characteristic of Auckland in the 1930s, Stokes Point is a good place to start. And there's the added bonus, too, of being able to see how it once looked through the eyes of expatriate British artist John Barr Clark Hoyte (1835-1913):
I feel a certain fondness for Hoyte's paintings. They're intensely idealised portraits of a land I think we'd all like to inhabit - a kind of lost paradise of gentle breezes and azure skies.
He apparently spent much of the 16 years he lived in New Zealand travelling "assiduously in search of new scenes to exploit" - whether it be Fiordland, the Volcanic Plateau, or picturesque views of the Pink and White Terraces. However, despite the dramatic character of most of these places:
it appears that his preference was for a more gentle, picturesque mode of landscape art rather than the heightened tensions of the sublime. The Otago Guardian in 1876 described 'the aspect of repose which usually characterises Mr Hoyte's illustrations of native landscapes'.That's it exactly: "the aspect of repose." What I like best about his views of Auckland harbour, in particular, is the way it becomes, for him (and thus for us as viewers), a place of light and beauty, with nature and man in perfect harmony.
It wasn't, of course. Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruki was still waging guerilla war down on the East Coast. Auckland had just been supplanted as capital of New Zealand by a cabal of Australian commissioners. The economy was perilously up and down, and the relations between settlers and tangata whenua shaky at best.
Hoyte looks at all these things from afar. His fascination with light allows them to disappear for him. But that's what gives his work - for me, at least - its sense of historical irony.
Life was never like that in Auckland; but sometimes, when we kids sailed round the bays of the upper harbour in my father's little trailer-sailer, that sense of unattainable perfection seemed perilously close.
I suppose that's why I chose these paintings by John Hoyte as the backdrop for my new website: a collection of most of my published poems to date.
There's much to be said for trying to break new ground. I imagine we all like to think ourselves as fresh and original in our writing and thinking. Sometimes, though - perhaps most of the time? - "the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back" (T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages). This site, then:
contains the texts of all of the full-length poetry collections I've published over the years. As well as that, I've reprinted most of the poetry chapbooks which came out over the same period. And on top of that, there's a grab-bag category of my published but uncollected poems, which I've grouped chronologically or under categories (poems included in Novels or Stories, for instance).
Before listing them in order, with their separate links, however, I thought I'd better say some more about the structure of the site itself.
The first thing you see, if you click on this link, will be the warning above.
This is because some of my poems contain swear words and bad language of various kinds, and I've noticed in the past that this tends to get flagged by roving web editors, who red flag and - in some cases - actually take down any pages which offend in this way.
I've therefore decided to mark this site - along with those devoted to my three novels, Nights with Giordano Bruno (2000), The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (2006), and E M O (2008) - as containing "Adult content".
This means that the "sensitive content" warning above is shown automatically to all potential readers, who will then have to log in with a Google ID to verify their age and adult status.
No doubt this will have the effect of reducing the number of clicks on each of these websites, but it also means that you have to be quite motivated to reach them - not in itself a bad thing. Bona fide readers are always very welcome, though.
Here, then, is a breakdown of the contents of my new poetry website:
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Poetry Books
- City of Strange Brunettes. ISBN 0-473-05446-9. Auckland: Pohutukawa Press, 1998.
- Chantal’s Book. ISBN 0-473-08744-8. Wellington: HeadworX, 2002.
- To Terezín. Afterword by Martin Edmond. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132. Auckland: Massey University, 2007.
- Celanie: Poems & Drawings after Paul Celan. by Jack Ross & Emma Smith, with an Afterword by Bronwyn Lloyd. ISBN 978-0-473-22484-4. Auckland: Pania Press, 2012.
- A Clearer View of the Hinterland: Poems & Sequences 1981-2014. ISBN 978-0-473-29640-7. Wellington: HeadworX, 2014.
- The Oceanic Feeling. Drawings by Katharina Jaeger. Afterword by Bronwyn Lloyd. ISBN 978-0-473-55801-7. Auckland: Salt & Greyboy Press, 2021.
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Poetry Chapbooks
- Ezra Pound’s Fascist Cantos (72 & 73) together with Rimbaud’s “Poets at Seven Years Old.” Translated by Jack Ross. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 1997.
- A Town Like Parataxis. Photographs by Gabriel White. ISBN 0-473-07104-5. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2000.
- The Perfect Storm. Video by Gabriel White. ISBN 0-473-07350-1. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2000.
- The Britney Suite. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2001.
- A Bus Called Mr Nice Guy. ISBN 0-473-10526-8. Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2005.
- Love in Wartime. Wellington: Pania Press, 2006.
- Papyri: Love poems & fragments from Sappho & elsewhere. ISBN 978-0-473-12397-0. Auckland: Soapbox Press, 2007.
- The Return of the Vanishing New Zealander. ISBN 978-0-9864507-6-1. Dunedin: Kilmog Press, 2009.
- Scenes from The Puppet Oresteia. Artwork by William T. Ayton. ISBN 978-0-473-18881-8. Rhinebeck, NY: Narcissus Press / Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2011.
- Fallen Empire: Museum of True History in Collaboration with Karl Chitham and Jack Ross. Dunedin: Blue Oyster Art Project Space, 2012.
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Miscellaneous
- Collage Poems (1997-2005)
- Poems from Novels (2000-2008)
- Poems from Stories (2004-2019)
- Tree Worship (2011-2012)
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Uncollected Poems
- Poems: 1981-1999
- Poems: 2000-2004
- Poems: 2005-2009
- Poems: 2010-2015
- Poems: 2016-2024
I'm not sure I'd recommend this approach to anyone else. I was inspired by Peter Simpson and Margaret Edgcumbe's online edition of Kendrick Smithyman's Collected Poems 1943-1995. If I'd had any idea of how much work it would be, though, I would probably just have contented myself with my old MSWord files.
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