Alan Brunton, Ian Wedde - still revolutionaries after all these years

By GUY ALLAN*

Robert Frost said that he did not dare to be radical in youth for fear that it would make him conservative when old.

Thirty years ago, Alan Brunton, in particular, and Ian Wedde were among the young revolutionaries of New Zealand poetry, generally known as the Freed group after the magazine of the time. How do they stand now, not old but definitely middle-aged?

If Brunton, who has published regularly in the intervening years, has any Frost-like anxieties, he should relax. Ecstasy is as exhilarating as anything he has written, not as self-consciously subversive as his earliest work but thrilling all the same.

As always, reading him is a matter of trusting the driver. The trip might be turbulent, as likely to be through wastelands of destruction as towards hope and ardent love. Everything is a grand event or at least a big adventure:

My mind opened like curtains at a matinee,

the b & w classics starting up at the ends

of my nerves like the faltering steps

of Zero Human at the end of the Jurassic.

In movie terms, he operates on a Bergman scale, with no room for faint emotion or other kind of slack. His explorations of strange lands are in the reckless spirit of Rimbaud. Brunton is, in short, unreconstructed.

Wedde's voice was always more deliberate and meditative. He preferred less spectacular expositions and gentler ironies, gained a higher critical stature and was, if you like, the more conservative poet.

He also stopped writing poetry. This is his first collection since Tendering (1988) - he calls the time since then a "dry spell". In recent years, his name has been associated more with Te Papa, where he is the humanities curator, than with literature. There are parts of The Commonplace Odes which seem to refer to the dry miseries of administration.

The ode sequence is classical, right down to invocations to a muse. Wedde chooses Horace, an ancient master of the form. From there, he explores what he calls "the grand themes in ordinary details".

It is an outstanding return. The ordinary details include friends and family (he is foremost a supreme love poet), pets, a cookbook and Taranaki. The grand themes feature beauty, death, art and, above all, language.

Wedde has always wrestled with his words. In one of the odes, he explains that he kept poetry "at bay" for some years since he saw language as "a kind of virus which infects whatever / It was I was trying to say".

Although it is, at best, never something to be trusted, he turns its very unreliability into dazzling artifice. Explicit cross references and smaller echoes run through the book, colouring the most ordinary details and their apparently easy-going description. They require an inward-outward reading, a continuous seesawing from the world outside the writing to the writing itself and back again.

Their methods differ but both Brunton and Wedde continue to keep the word freed.

ECSTASY
By Alan Brunton
Bumper Books $22

THE COMMONPLACE ODES
By Ian Wedde
Auckland University Press $19.95

* Guy Allan is an Auckland trade union official and freelance writer.