Brunton, Edmond and Leggott (editors): Big Smoke: New Zealand poems 1960-1975

Auckland University Press $49.95

Review: Guy Allan*

Several 50-something people have picked Big Smoke up from the kitchen table and leafed through it eagerly.

Few have commented on the poems themselves. Most have recalled an event such as Russell Haley's shouting erotics party piece; an acquaintance (I flatted with her) remarked on how right but odd it is that Stephen Chan is now dean of humanities at a British university.

This would probably not altogether disappoint the editors. The book, says Murray Edmond, is more a cultural history than an anthology.

The culture, according to Alan Brunton's introduction, was our version of the spirit of the Commune, more notable in the 1871 and 1968 Paris uprisings but alive here for a time.

It was a socio-politico-artistic movement, part of the Che-like insurrectionist optimism that the impossible could be made possible. Read any silly recent letter to the editor about Colin McCahon's painting and you might doubt that it had any effect at all. Read Michele Leggott's scrapbook chronology of the period and you should lament that it failed to continue.

Brunton notes sadly that, when governments did eventually let go, the freedom that really came to flourish was in finance and business. Literature meanwhile settled for mediocrity and convention.

The poems themselves cover nearly 300 pages of text. Big Smoke does not claim to be a best-of selection. The representation is broad because the range of endeavour was broad.

The more exuberant seem trapped in the book's thickness, seldom as startling or as hilarious as in their original publication. Others read better as cultural examples than as brilliant poems, more intent on rendering emotion or displaying erudition or sprawling in neo-Beat style than on putting the best words in the best order.

This is hardly surprising for those who considered themselves, as one manifesto put it, maggots drawing new life from the decayed corpse of poetry. Stances were adopted and the poems that announced them were always at risk of being only platforms.

The best were from those who heeded Brunton's definition of poetry in the first issue of Freed magazine, as the mimesis of men's actions beyond the intellect, its exhausted nomenclatures, verbal pabulum.

What had to be made new was, as always, language itself. The most gifted poets - such as Brunton, Edmond, Ian Wedde, Bill Manhire, Mark Young, the outlaw Peter Olds - had a lightness of touch and the occasional deft quietness which set them above the rest.

The editors' essays are excellent, Brunton's inspiring in its championing of the Commune spirit.

As literary record, cultural history or reminder of a good time to be young, Big Smoke is a resounding success.


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