Earlier this year, 2020, as the country prepared to go into lockdown against the COVID-19 pandemic – strange to think how quickly even this global cataclysm is bound to recede into memory – I read an interesting interview with Kiwi bard Sam Hunt.
“How do poets deal with such things?” asked the interviewer, Hunt’s longtime mate Colin Hogg.
“I’m a poet only when I’m writing a poem,” replied Hunt. “Otherwise I’m just hanging round, listening to the silence.”
Just hanging around, listening to the silence.
It’s hard to imagine a better definition of poetry than that.
Wordsworth called it “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and added that “it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” That’s pretty much the same thing, though, if you think about it.
I first met Chris Gallavin at a large Academic forum at Massey University, where both of us work. I guess I was struck at once by his larger-than-life ebullience and enthusiasm for every subject he touches: Law, University Administration, and – as it turned out – poetry.
I teach poetry there, at Massey (as well as trying to write it), and I have to admit that it was a little surprising to find so much fascination in him for something which can feel, at times, like a recondite art.
We cemented this acquaintance when he invited me to stay in his sleep-out during the 2017 Manawatu Writers’ Festival, which he co-hosted with other local writers at the Feilding Public Library. I saw then the massive library of New Zealand poetry he’d amassed over the years, jostling for space with long shelves of sober law books.
Given his druthers, he told me, he’d spend all day long in the sleep-out, reading poetry and wandering around the garden, like a T’ang dynasty sage.
Gallavin’s poetic heroes are all on display in this, his first full-length collection:
And we listened to Sam ....
'Hunt' you finished the
Sentence before I could
Say we all need heroes,
Even if some like fathers
Are a bit broken-down
as he puts it in “Milla,” the second of two heartfelt poems addressed to his daughter.
James K. Baxter puts in a somewhat subdued appearance, too:
I was caught today
Reading a book of Baxter
Quietly on a sofa, where I sat
Tempted to lay my grey flecked head.
‘That looks like an old man's book’
Said with a smile.
I did not know what to say
Save a breathed and lonely,
‘Yes, I suppose it is’.
As a poet, Gallavin has many strengths. I admire the vernacular love poems he addresses to his first Ford Cortina (‘My First Love’) and his local fish n chip shop. There’s a genuine passion for New Zealand scenery and weather on display here, too.
The temptation – as always – is to continue to quote examples, but I don’t want to keep you from the body of his book any longer, so I think I’ll have to content myself with only one of these, a Bashō-like evocation of the charms of winter:
I stand at the window
Cloaked, first cold coat,
A cocoon of clouds,
In this my new winter.
Good luck, then, to Chris Gallavin in all his new ventures, poetic and otherwise!
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Works cited:
Colin Hogg, “Sam Hunt: We’ll be wiser, weaker folk.” Newsroom (7/4/20): [Available at: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2020/04/07/1117315/sam-hunt-well-come-out-weaker-and-wiser?fbclid=IwAR3aEk5mMEb5gRYEy9BwU6U9MRYIsH7U8sLcmh0moUFiNrXETX-FpiGRG0c].
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(19-20/7/20)
“Introduction: Listening to the Silence.” In Chris Gallavin: A Dance Together. Feilding: Prow Publishing, 2021.
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