A Field Officer's Notebook (2019)

Jack Ross, ed.: Poetry NZ Yearbook 2019 (March 2019)

Reviews:

Dan Davin / Alistair Paterson / Johanna Emeney

Dan Davin. A Field Officer’s Notebook: Selected Poems. Ed. Robert McLean. ISBN 978-0-473-43068-9. Lyttelton: Cold Hub Press, 2018. RRP $29.95. 82 pp.

Dan Davin: A Field Officer’s Notebook (2018)

Crawling on all fours to retch up bile Into the lavatory bowl, Not knowing whether it was dark or day, And, ten floors below in that ghastly street Hearing a woman scream.

That’s the opening of Dan Davin’s poem ‘That Night in 1954 on 53rd Street in New York’ – nothing if not specific. It’s fairly characteristic of his post-war poems, collected in this book for the first time by the indefatigable Robert McLean, who sees them as ‘quite unlike anything in New Zealand literature – exacting yet generous, angry but tender’.

Davin was a legendary drunk and womaniser, and – it would appear from this and most of the other poems – his dark night of the soul reached, at times, depths seldom reached by even the most despairing of bards. The poem continues:

Lately free of another lovely,
You in your sweat-drenched sheets
Did not have courage or strength
To go down in the elevator
And help her. You desperate clown,
I’d knock you down if you were not inside me.

I don’t know if I’d describe the poem as an example of self-knowledge so much as of self-loathing taken to almost Beckettian extremes. Is it really so great a crime to be so prostrate from drink and self-indulgence that you can’t bring yourself to go down ten floors in a lift to look for more trouble? Few of us might think so. Davin does, though, and it seems impossible to doubt his sincerity in this and other poems, meant more for himself than for the reading public, one can’t help feeling. Dan Davin is, of course, far better known for his prose: Roads from Home (1949) is probably his most famous work of fiction, but he wrote six other novels and a great many short stories as well as a memoir, Closing Times (1975). He was also responsible for the Crete volume of the New Zealand official war history (1953).

Despite living most of his life overseas – in Oxford, principally, where he became an important official at the University Press – Davin’s imaginative work circled back endlessly to New Zealand: to Invercargill in particular, where he grew up as part of the Irish diaspora. Though he himself claimed to be a victim of the ‘great New Zealand clobbering machine,’ there seems no risk that his work will be forgotten anytime soon.

All of which adds to the importance and usefulness of this collection of his poems. Are they good? Not in an expected way, no, I wouldn’t think. I don’t really see this as a major addition to World War II poetry – a volume to put alongside Keith Douglas or Alun Lewis, though it does certainly include a few setpieces somewhat reminiscent of their work – ‘Egyptian Madonna’ and ‘Cairo Cleopatra’ prominent among them.

What I did find in it was an unexpectedly intense lyric gift. The earlier poems, though certainly strongly Yeats-influenced, have a power to them which might well have grown into greatness if he’d chosen to pursue it. “Winter Galway” (dated ‘Paris, 1937’), for instance:

Lost in my father’s youth is that strange land.
No goats ran leaping from the hill
When I came there and the fairies did not know
My father’s son. Only the grey walls
Still ran greyly over the moody hills
And gentle rain fell melancholy
On the son of a lost son.

That has something of the air of Louis MacNeice’s: ‘Look into your heart, you will find a County Sligo, / … the shadow and sheen of a moleskin mountain / And a litter of chronicles and bones.’ Of the book’s three sections, the first, ‘Before’, includes only 8 pages of poetry; the second, ‘During’, has risen to 14; but the third, ‘After’, has a full 47. It would have to be said, then, that the overwhelming note of this collection is postwar depression and angst: self-hatred, self-contempt (as in the poem I began with), and very little of that wonderful lyrical charm of his early verse.

Many of the poems in this final section are very short: epigrams and quatrains found scribbled in his papers (now housed in the Alexander Turnbull library) by his editor Robert McLean, though one doubts that their author would have thought them worthy of preservation in this form.

There, though, I’m with McLean. Despairing and slight though they are at times, there’s an honesty and directness about all of these poems which makes them rewarding to read. As McLean himself puts it: ‘Davin’s best poems inscribe themselves on one’s mind’ – but then so do some of the shorter, more throwaway ones. ‘Despair,’ for instance:

Despair? Do you use it rightly?
I’m not sure. But I feel it nightly.
And whether it’s despair or not
The hours go very slowly
And the devil’s stopped the clock.

Or:

Waiting for the pubs to open,
Waiting for that beer;
Who can think of Einstein
Or of Shakespeare’s Lear?

There is, to be sure, a certain note of misogyny and lad-ism in many of the poems which rings rather false nowadays:

She padlocked her virginity
And threw away the key.
But I was passing, luckily,
And thought it meant for me.

I’m afraid that this also makes such set-piece poems as ‘Cairo Cleopatra’ unassimilable for me – both she and the ‘Egyptian Madonna’ are too obviously exhibited as objects rather than as living human beings, but one would have to admit that it would be a rare (male) poet of the 1940s of whom that couldn’t be said.

Certainly Davin was a romantic. His early love poems are very moving indeed, and the disillusionment brought about by the war and the ‘long littleness’ of its aftermath had the usual effects on his ability to idealise his surroundings.

Let’s end, then, with some lines from one of the most beautiful of those late poems, the aptly entitled ‘Waiting, Snookered’:

Neither of us was where
I wait, old man, still. No corners;
Neither Dee not Tay, nor other misleading streets.
A road, though. A straight and straitening road.
She is not there.
Nor am I. We have reached the uncovenanted, uncornered street,
Where we die.

I think it was Alun Lewis who said that there were, in the final analysis, only two subjects for poetry: love and death. Certainly one would have to say that that’s true of Davin’s verse: it veers constantly from one to the other, with a preponderance of Thanatos gradually overpowering the pleasure principle.

This book is the chronicle of a man’s life as much as a simple collection of poems, and one has to say that (for me, at least) it makes Dan Davin a far more sympathetic and approachable character, both as a writer and a human being.

(12-13/9/18)

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2019. ISBN 978-0-9951029-6-5 (March 2019): 303-7.

[1139 wds]


Poetry NZ Yearbook 2019


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