1989

Selected Poems
Peter Bland

John McIndoe
1987, 79 pp.

Murray Bramwell

I was about fifteen when I first read Peter Bland. By some oversight his first collection, My Side of the Story, had found its way on to the shelves of my high school library. I presumed it be an oversight because nothing about my high school days led me to believe that such a subversive book of poems could ever have been knowingly put there. Here were these satiric grenades quietly rolling towards the respectable, complacent assumptions of provincial New Zealand in 1964. Poems with titles such as “Past the Tin Butterflies and Plaster Gnomes” and “Lines on Leaving the Last Reservation -State Housing Area : Hutt Valley” gave expression to a discontent about this little Eden at the end of the earth. And the author was an ingrate immigrant, the sort of Englishman refered to by New Zealanders as a moaning Pom; the sort of Englishman who could jolly well go back home again if he didn’t like what he saw.

Not that Bland was the first to give voice to such views. A.R.D. Fairburn had had plenty to say back in the forties in such poems as “I’m Older Than You Please Listen” :

This land is a lump without leaven
a body that has no nerves.
Don’t be content to live in
a sort of second-grade heaven
with first grad butter, fresh air,
and paper in every toilet …

Fairburn, was appalled at the way New Zealanders kow-towed to England as Home, even though most would never lay eyes on the place and he was unforgiving of the New Zealand tendency to repress vitality and to live lives of self-imposed and fastidious habit :

In the suburbs the spirit of man
walks on the garden path
walks on the well-groomed lawn, dwells
among the manicured shrubs.
The variegated hedge encircles life.
The abode of wind and sun, where clouds trample the sky
and hills are stretched like arms heaped up with bounty,
in the countryside the land is
the space between the barbed-wire fences,
mortgaged in bitterness, measured in butterfat.

(“Utopia”)

Twenty years later, Peter Bland, along with fellow poets from the so-called Wellington school – Romantics and wits like Louis Johnson and James K.Baxter – was still harping on similar themes and I for one welcomed this chorus of disapproval particularly amidst the stuffy self-congratulation of the Holyoake National government, the unctuous platitudes about the value of continuing sporting contact with South Africa and much humbug else.

It was due to people like Peter Bland, young, energetic and fearless, that New Zealand started to look at itself. British artists, teachers and broadcasters provided invaluable impetus to a culture which had become perilously moribund, it seemed, before it had even begun. It sounds quaint now, but in universities and teachers’ colleges, in the New Zealand Listener and the little magazines- Landfall, Mate, Argot and Education- it was these abrasive English men and women, with their beards and coloured stockings, their Northern accents and disgruntled manners who insisted that life in the theatres, bookshops, coffee bars and pubs should take some note of life beyond the Tasman Sea.

In an early poem, “Remembering England”, Peter Bland, registers both a dislike for the post-war Britain he had left at nineteen -“I taste the damp recurring thought/ of being bred to expect so little.”- and his sense of dislocation in an unsophisticated colony which seriously saw itself as God’s Own:

No wonder, then, that our lives congeal
when we settle here like convalescents
to blink in this hard light and build
our hospital-homes of sun and butter.
What more could we want… the journey done
and hygiene triumphant over passion ?
All that remains is to play the nurse
in this sanatorium for British anger.

In another poem, Wellington, Bland writes –

I stand
Committed to imaginary landfalls …
The back door of a British council house
Could only lead out to the new Jerusalem:
Blake’s burning bow was bound to scorch my hand.

Peter Bland’s Selected Poems make particularly pleasurable reading for long-time admirers of his work. There is a sense of continuity of theme, a familiar wry accomplishment in these poems, written over a span of twenty-five years, which identifies him as a writer of prescience and affectionate commitment. The Selected Bland has its omissions -“The Other Eden”, “Mother” and “Trains”, from the first volume for instance- but others, “The Parental Bedroom”, “The Nose” and “Death of a Dog” readily compensate.

Bland has always celebrated his domestic world with gentle irony and Wordsworthian regard, splendidly captured in an early poem -“For My Daughter’s First Day at School” :

..Again,
I face the the flagged school-yard where fear
Was learnt from the herd and from authority.
And yet she reminds me that even fear
Can be transformed, that a singular knowledge
Grows within like the kicking child
I watched grow strong in her mother’s body:
For, born alone, we were meant to speak
Not with a crowded intellect only
But out of the heart and in spite of all
The herd may teach, or flags may proclaim as holy.

There is a vulnerable, lambent quality here that the poet may have prefered to leave Unselected in the current volume, but for me it captures his side of the story. Another facet, harder, mordantly sharp,
can be found with his persona, Mr Maui, the demi-god as wide boy and mercenary opportunist:

…KERUNCH ! I’m hooked
on progress, on corridors of power,
sheer surfaces, neon sparkle, lifts
as big as buses, the whispered hush
of executive toilets. I’m creative.
I raise great ladders. I dangle the sun.

“Mr Maui Builds a New Office Block”

Mr Maui becomes The Man With the Carpet Bag in the 1972 collection of that name, linking again with the poet’s continuing preoccupation with Nineteenth century colonial history:

I’m afraid of the man in the mural. The one
in the Trading Bank (dated 1860)
with his top hat and his carpet bag
and his talent for `getting things going’

Trim-bearded Adam; Founding father;
the fixed face of all Authority !
Everyone plays grab with that bag-man:
they all insist he’s one of the family.

Mr Maui has the show to himself with Bland’s 1976 volume. Our Polynesian superhero is seen musing on his way to the film studio –

here’s me in my milk-white Rolls
scattering the slaves. I’ve signed up
to play the part of myself in a dream
of how this bastard from a broken home
became a god. Even so
I’m in hock to bigger gods
who live behind closed doors …

With his return to England in 1968 Bland writes of the life he left behind, the road less taken. There are brash moments such as Mr Maui tossing his grandfather’s suit of armour back over the palace wall, and quieter portraits of the poet’s parents in “Two Family Snaps”. But he also sees how much he was shaped and vexed by his own historical moment in “Lament for a Lost Generation”:

Between VJ Day and 1951
we wore our first grey longs.
Drab, insular, short of vitamin C …
…We were few; conceived in the slump;
brought up in shelters and under the stairs;

eleven-plus boys, the last of a line.
You can tell us a mile off, even now;
there’s a touch of austerity
under the eyes, a hint of carbolic

in our after-shave; a lasting doubt
about the next good time.

Bland’s most recent volume The Crusoe Factor (1985) takes him full circle with his explorations and the end is to know the most familiar places for the first time. Counterpointing his “Memories of a Northern Childhood” are some unhistorical stories (interestingly, dedicated to Allen Curnow) entitled “Letters Home- New Zealand 1885”, and his Crusoe poems depicting the poet as stranger in his home land. As Mrs Crusoe complains :

He and that Sambo stroll through York
like common labourers- in spite
of my hand-made shirts and silks.
He shames me with his silences,
won’t visit relatives or go to church.
How can he call himself an Englishman ?
He’s only happy when newly marooned

Bland has been living back in New Zealand for the past couple of years and continues his whimsical
attempt to capture the world with a grain of truth, mindful of the absurd ways we organise our lives and celebratory of its splendid ordinariness:

Where we’ll end up is anyone’s guess
but, once again, an infinite longing
tempts me to put on my best Chagall face
and whistle sad tunes on windy street corners
in the hope you’ll see through this thin
disguise called Age, and call out my name
and beg me to praise your beauty.

“Let’s Meet”.

Peter Bland remains one of New Zealand’s shrewdest, surest and most readable poets. Actor, director, poet, even star of his own computer commercial his contribution has been a singular one and his modest but richly satisfying Selected Poems are as nifty as they always seemed back in my provincial high school library.

“Poet in a Second Grade Heaven”, CRNLE Reviews Journal, No.1 ,1989, pp.101-5.