Pat White. Watching for the Wingbeat: New and Selected Poems. ISBN 978-0-473-44420-4. Lyttelton: Cold Hub Press, 2018. RRP $39.95. 164 pp.
Pat White’s new book of selected poems covers 40 years of his writing life, from Signposts in 1977 to Fracking & Hawk in 2015, together with some uncollected and unpublished work.
The first impression it gives is continuity. White’s preoccupations have, it seems, always been what they are now: landscape, love, history, the natural world.
A great deal of care has clearly gone into winnowing out the best pieces from this lifetime of work. It would be very hard to find a false note. It is nevertheless true that there’s an austerity about the earliest poems here which has been modulated and complicated by White’s experiments with the long line in more recent times. Take, for instance, an early poem such as ‘Paperbacks’:
That was the summerThis is a wonderful piece: spare, telling, making the single image of these ‘grubby books / that fed our empty heads’ stand for a whole world of adult responsibilities, leavened by a spine of humorous selfdeprecation.
when the paperbacks grew mould
from the damp
of the outhouse floor
. . .
when graduation took its leave
of student flats
with cheap editions
of expensive ideals . . .
And yet, when you contrast it with a more recent poem such as ‘Getting out of the car, Danseys Pass’, you can see how much these years of practice, of constant circling in on that central mystery of concise expression, have done for the strength and flexibility of his idiom:
A shingle road winding through mist on hillsThis evocation of the joys — and complexities — of ‘following this road / in search of God knows what’ is on a different order of suggestiveness and complexity than the early poems, fine though they are.
tussock beside the cutting, silhouette against
a drop down to Maerewhenua Stream
cutting deeper than epiphany
through schist
and the other side of the road
in drizzling rain
There’s nothing ‘simple’ about the experiences presented here, and nothing casual about the musical skill with which the words are modulated, almost like one of Beethoven’s late quartets.
But what is Pat White about as a poet? Pastoral, once a byword for escapism and irrelevance, has become one of the central modes of our time: whether in the guise of dystopian ‘eco-poetry’ or utopian nostalgia. Is that why White seems suddenly so relevant? So armoured by integrity against the accusations of complacency and self-regard that can afflict other poets attempting so comprehensive a summing-up of their achievement?
I would argue that pastoral concerns have only ever been part of his worldview. In a poem such as ‘For my children’, for instance, he scores a rather dismal and unsought rhyme with some very topical concerns:
One year when things were tightGun enthusiasts can’t understand why the rest of us show so little sympathy when they moan about the compulsory loss of their pretties. My father was a gun-nut, so I think I know a few things about the type. To him, an old rifle or musket was a miracle of applied engineering, a beautiful piece of craftmanship with only the most tenuous relationship to its original function. To me, it was an instrument of death which I could hardly bear to put my hands on. It reeked of blood.
that old rifle was sold. It was no
accident, but contemplation of
cut throats, fascination
with destruction has marked
itself into the marrow
of too many generations.
White’s poem concludes:
If you visited me now, thereBy no stretch of the imagination could this be described as a propaganda poem, but it is, I suppose, polemical in these times of compulsory buybacks of firearms in the wake of the March 2019 Christchurch terror attack. But it makes its point so gently that it would be hard to reject the idyllic vision of those last few lines.
is a garden to sit in, a drink
to share, and talking to do.
Across the bay, a bluff
where rock crumbles, is
shaping trees’ stubborn growth.
There’s no heirloom to argue over.
There had to be a time to halt
the darkness of such bitter games.
The point is that White knows. He knows why people love their guns. I don’t love them, but I did love my father, and I respect the sincerity of his attachment to the aesthetics of these ambassadors from a not-toodistant past. Those ‘bitter games’ at the end of the poem ring very true, also.
It’s a commonplace that Scottish families always fall out over wills and heirlooms (not that I suppose it’s a purely Scottish trait). I had an aunt who went mad when she wasn’t left the pieces of furniture she wanted in another of my ancestors’ wills.
Guns, bad blood — it’s all in the poem. That’s one of the many reasons why I love Pat White’s work, and find it a continuing source of inspiration. It feels very close to me.
I’ll conclude with some lines from another one of his great this-is-the- state-of-things-for-me-now poems, ‘Elemental’. Midway through, he evokes ‘a poet who wrote / hawk-like, no longer in need / of predatory advice, able to spiral / onto a stray word, sneak it from the set’. The words could apply just as easily to White himself.
Like that poet (T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes? — certain internal references to Four Quartets would suggest the first), he’s very definitely ‘not shovelling bullshit’:
It’s difficult to forget how much we knowIf you are intending to read Pat White, this is the book to buy. If you’re not, I have to say that you’re missing a treat: a collection that brings together poems that are beautiful, unassuming and perfectly paced, all at the same time.
and look at the site as if for the first time
to catch the flow but not the flood
nobody told me
it never got easier, this putting on the page.
Poetry NZ Yearbook 2020 Booklaunch (10 March, 2020)
(30-31/7/19)
Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2020. ISBN 978-0-9951229-3-2 (March 2020): 330-33.
[1004 wds]
Poetry NZ Yearbook 2020
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