Bill Sewell: The Ballad of Fifty-One

Reviewed by PENELOPE BIEDER*

Wellington writer and editor Bill Sewell died this year after a battle with cancer, but he was pleased to be there for the launch of this, his last major collection of poems, which are a sequence about the 1951 waterfront lockout.

For an event which bitterly divided the country to an extent not seen since, except perhaps for the 1981 Springbok Tour, these poems are remarkably dry and restrained, and therein lies their power.

Even the anger is resigned, perhaps mirroring the frustrations of those long-ago workers, throttled and silenced by the state. The double-speak of the time is thrown into sharp relief in a poem titled The Uses of Metaphor which is just as relevant today: "When you mean invasions/to say storm/ when you mean insurrection/to say capsize/when you mean overthrow/to say shipwreck/when you mean defeat - /to say drowned/when you mean dead.

Sewell's constant subtext in these poems is the possibility of the return of the suspension of the rights and freedoms that we take for granted now.

In The Legacy he notes that "the real beneficiaries remained always out of touch, behind the balance of payments, private overseas funds". He may be directly referring to the English commercial barons who controlled the shipping, the freezing works, the whole export scene. But the beneficiaries he mentions could also be the succeeding generations of workers sublimely unaware of the struggles of those who went before.

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer.

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