Chapter 2

Oliver’s other new collection, Deadly Pollen, is an ambitious undertaking - a meditation, in large measure, on Wallace Stevens and his legacy - and brings together thirty-five short lyrics into a loosely linked sequence which examines the state of the world after 9/11. And the poem is not ‘merely’ political, for it diagnoses a state of spiritual malaise based on fear, a state of crisis in which the role of the poet is in question. So far, so good. But if this is a crisis poem, it is also a crisis in which (and this is my reservation) I find it difficult to believe, though it has been the subject of much recent American commentary. And in any case, there is also an enormous amount to admire in the language and in the range of reference.

I can convey something of the fineness of Oliver’s craftsmanship in his translation of Horace’s ‘Pyrrha’ ode, a translation which fits into Oliver’s theme of disillusionment, and of his modernist distrust of beauty in person and in diction. The quiet intensity, and the distanced, almost intellectualized sensuality, of the language in which Oliver brings alive the golden-haired Pyrrha, Horace’s femme fatale, is perfect:

Pyrrha, your dewy hair, yellow, scented, doubly wreathed in Jasmine, fresh from the trellis this morning.... (lyric 12)

Nor is Oliver’s ambition here as limited as it might seem, for in taking on such a translation Oliver is setting himself up against a history of translations, and most notably one by Milton. It is a challenge in which he succeeds admirably. And in the later lines of the lyric, Oliver marks his disengagement by a withdrawal into a more demotic register. For while he is adept at finding occasion for the lyrical richness of which modernism was always suspicious, he also writes at times in a spare modern voice, as in the following lines which may owe something to the New Zealand poet Curnow’s ‘Canto of Signs’:

Rubbed off sky exposes an undercoat of white that is really fuzzed, mid-day heat. Birds change over shifts. Things settle. Shadow drops under eaves, tier by tier .... (lyric 32)

The language here has a powerful antipodean flatness, and depends on its laconic pauses. And if ‘things settle’, it is because, as the allusion to Yeats suggests, things are about to fall apart; and we move to images of Bali. Oliver goes on in a following lyric to demonstrate his gift for image, in his intense visualization of Spring’s strange bloom, the terrorist’s bomb:

Compression of bees, shrub-shaped, in proton loops, on cushioned air. Spring! See the counter, its bright ticking with fail-safe growth. (lyric 34)

Political poets do not always manage to capture so well the estrangement which is necessary for successful social comment.

Similarly, Oliver demonstrates an unsettled verbal mastery in a bravura display, a description of architectural form:

... Complex of accented runs, angles, drops, sluices, pumps, ditches, endless unbowed archways... (lyric 11)

The language here is finely controlled, from the way in which the ‘x’ sound is perfectly balanced in the opening phrase, to the series of falling monosyllables which are released in the enjambed expansiveness of the final phrase with its open vowels. The language is reminiscent of Les Murray’s ‘Bent Water’ (surely Murray’s masterpiece). But the lines I have just quoted continue in rhythms which, while still lyrical, are also more unsettling: ‘archways, treatment ponds breaking into/sunlight’. For where Murray’s language embodies a confident belief in God, Oliver’s has been a celebration of a public sewer - and more to the point, a sewer envisioned but (in an act of creative failure) never built.

Late in the poem, Oliver brings together these themes in a grim reflection upon the role of the poet - in a voice in which the emotion is italicized but never allowed to run outside its bounds:

One quadrant of sky turns, face up, black as the ace of spades. Much as a God can manage muttering from the side of his mouth. Star flecks, nova spittle. Rage of emptiness pours through, for the hell of it, endlessly. Looking back to what beginning. The whole shebang advances toward, beyond our best efforts. We live under a Niagra of star fall, huge optics dilate time, blackness like velvet slips over chrome. Sounds of nothingness strung between a singlet of lights. (lyric 30).

This is vintage Oliver. The language is elaborate, but perfectly judged, undercut by a colloquial impulse (‘black as the ace of spades’, ‘for the hell / of it’). This undersong speaks of Oliver’s awareness of his place as / a poet of the vernacular republic; but it also speaks, in its use of cliche, of a loss of faith in the resources of poetic language.

And something similar can be said of its use of Stevens, for where Stevens is the poet who brought romantic metaphysics to its final crisis, and with it the end of any hope of finding essential meaning in the world, Oliver’s use of Stevens here seems also an act of deliberate failure. The stanza alludes to Stevens’s Jove, a false divinity who ‘moved among us, as a muttering king’ in ‘Sunday Morning’, and to that poem’s existential conclusion that (contra Milton) ‘We live in an old chaos of the sun’. Like Stevens in ‘Key West’, Oliver laments the ‘Blessed rage for order’, the ‘glassy lights’ which gave a bogus sense of structure to the sea. But in a sense, and an important sense, much of the language of Oliver’s stanza is the language of Stevens: it is an eloquent testament to a failure to find in the present a viable voice for poetry.

Clearly there is much in this sequence which I find powerful, and respond to warmly. Many of the lyrics are perfect, and thematically the poem traverses many of the issues which are at the heart of poetry today: from the modernist legacy of deep worries over memory and metaphor, to a more contemporary juxtaposition of dictions and registers, and a concern with post-modernism and the end of history. It is a sequence which is not afraid to take on Stevens, or Milton and Hardy and Auden. But I would like to see it slightly reshaped, for I feel that there is a great poem hiding in here somewhere, if only I could be persuaded more of its motivation. I think fear does lie at the heart of its psychology, but the real fear is artistic rather than political; and if this could be worked more into the texture of the poem, along with some editing of the poem’s middle section, we would have a major achievement not only in Oliver’s oeuvre, but in antipodean writing.