WH Oliver: Poems 1946-2005

W.H. Oliver is probably best known as an historian; he wrote The Story of New Zealand (1960), and later edited The Oxford History of New Zealand (1981), and the first volume of the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography (1990). He also wrote a biography of poet James K. Baxter and a first-rate memoir, Looking for the Phoenix (2002). His prose is notable for the balance and subtlety of his thinking and the elegance of his style.

Like other New Zealand historians — a tradition instigated by William Pember Reeves a century ago and carried on by Keith Sinclair — Oliver is also a poet and has gathered into this elegantly designed volume poems written over almost 60 years.

As a poet Oliver has never beaten a big rhetorical drum or gone in for flashy and crowd-pleasing effects; rather his poems are refined, intelligent and subtle. His closest parallel among local poets is perhaps Charles Brasch, of whom there is an admiring study in Portraits — a group of unrhyming sonnets.

Others celebrated in this sequence (not identified by name) are the poets with whom Oliver shared his youth in Wellington, including Baxter, Alistair Campbell and Louis Johnson. These were the so-called "Wellington-group" who set up a noisy oppositional clamour to the landscape-centred nationalism of older poets such as Fairburn, Curnow and Glover, leading to some spirited gang warfare between the different poetic groups.

Oliver's early poems were collected in Fire Without Phoenix (1957). Nowadays they seem rather solemn and old-fashioned, though well-written, with their liking for literary and mythological themes and their pervasive religious imagery. More interesting are the poems written in and about England where he went to study at Oxford (especially In the Fields of My Father's Youth).

He then fell silent for more than 20 years (preoccupied no doubt with his career as an academic historian), until he published Out of Season (1980) and Poor Richard (1982). These are more lively, casual and various than his earlier poems, especially Poor Richard, a marvellous verbal portrait of Richard John Seddon, and Dear Kanga, which utilises characters from Winnie the Pooh for a lively and linguistically innovative satire of New Zealand social mores. A fourth book, Bodily Presence, inspired by a friend's paintings, came out in 1993.

All four books are included complete, together with a few uncollected poems — some early, some late — to make up the present volume. It makes an excellent and thoroughly enjoyable book.

* Peter Simpson is head of English at the University of Auckland and editor of the recently published Nine New Zealand Novellas.
* Victoria University Press, $29.95