Gregory O'Brien: After bathing at Baxters: Essays and notebooks

By JOHN McCRYSTAL

What poets are good at, typically, is picking up a word you've always taken for granted and using it in a way that had never occurred to you, like the person who comes along and shows you all the appendages your good old Swiss Army Knife possesses that you'd never known about. It's all about lateral thinking, recognising affinities, drawing connections.

"I've always loved the coincidences that life automatically seems to manufacture," Gregory O'Brien writes.

"Part of being some sort of an artist, as I understand it, is the knitting together of these coincidences - not to make something necessarily coherent from them, rather to orchestrate the chaos and serendipity and complexity so, perhaps, the reader might discover a faintly suggested order or meaning."

Readers of O'Brien's poetry will recognise this remark as a kind of manifesto of his style. So will listeners to his occasional expositions of poetry on the Kim Hill radio show, and so, too, will readers of his essays, of which Bathing at Baxters is a collection.

Not for him the logical progression of an argument toward a conclusion: rather, O'Brien constructs an essay as he would a poem, as a series of stanzas, each consisting of a short, aphoristic observation, all linked by association.

The juxtaposition of what, to the naked eye, are unrelated objects generates friction and blinding flashes of illumination. What you are left with is, to lift another of his phrases out of context, "vistas of refracted light and echoes or resonances".

This is the effect not only of the individual essays, but of the collection as a whole.

It is divided into three parts - literary criticism, autobiographical fragments and artistic exposition - but these parts are far from hermetically sealed and the colours bleed across the boundaries.

O'Brien finds the coincidences of which he speaks everywhere, thanks to his polymathic grasp and appreciation of every conceivable artistic discipline.

Indeed, no field of human endeavour seems excluded from his definition of art (except, perhaps, television): even the business of living, to O'Brien's craftsman's eye, can have a shape, which is how in the first essay, the point of departure of the collection, he is able to criticise the crudeness of James K. Baxter's religious phase, as though Baxter's spirituality was an artistic endeavour.

One of the more appealing consequences of this outlook is the democratisation which it works on artistic criticism.

For such an intellectual magpie as O'Brien, all considerations such as stature, celebrity, reputation and market price are irrelevant beside the shine of things.

Hence, he is able to discuss minor, even unknown, artistic figures right alongside the greats, like a metallurgist who is able to discuss gold and base metals purely in terms of malleability and hardness.

It enables O'Brien to appreciate both low and high-brow art on equal terms. Doubtless it also accounts for the humility and reverence with which he is able to upset the tables in the temple of even so exalted a local deity as Baxter.

I found some of the essays in this collection pretty obscure, particularly in the third section which requires, I think, a much larger vocabulary of the terms of visual art than I possess.

Others were simply delightful, such as the conversation with kindred spirit Denis McEldowney which concludes the literary section, and Radio Birdman which treats the commercial display of a MiG fighter in the Waikato a few years back as an artistic installation. Most were intensely stimulating, a kind of mental-fitness video.

If you're of a mind to broaden your intellectual horizons, or even to get an aerial view of the landscape, then give this book a go.

It will make you smarter: I can feel it working already.

Victoria University Press

$39.95

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.