Hone Tuwhare: Piggy-back moon

By GREGORY O'BRIEN*

It's always interesting tracking a poet's progress towards old age or at the end of their life.

With the exception of Allen Curnow - whose resolute gaze at and grasp of the world remain as tight as ever - poets tend to make various adjustments. Some start to burn and rage: one of James K. Baxter's last published poems was the irreverent Ode to Auckland - a diatribe against the city and its citizens. Approaching death, Rainer Maria Rilke, who usually composed in German, took up French. Some poets stop writing.

Probably the closest model for what Hone Tuwhare is up to in his new book is the late poetry of Pablo Neruda. Near the end of his life, the Chilean wrote poems celebrating the physical surroundings and daily existence of his "autumnal years" on Isla Negra, a village on his homelands Pacific Coast.

Staring back from the other side of the Pacific, Tuwhare, aged 79, sets himself a similar task in Piggy-back Moon. Locating himself firmly at Kaka Point, in South Otago, he contemplates time and nature, remembers friends who have died and converses with the sea-god Tangaroa, who is both provider and destroyer.

The poems are like pages of a diary in that they are relaxed and discursive rather than tightly formed. There's a playfulness, an unruliness and an immersion in the physical world with all its textures, smells and particularly its sounds - the sighs, grunts and groans and the ever-present white noise of the sea.

What is most remarkable in Piggy-back Moon is Tuwhare's undiminished impulse to describe the world - and in describing it to make a fundamental connection. Often in these poems, he piles on the adverbs and adjectives:

At the worm-wrigglers ball,

they're twisting and frumping inextricably,

in an intricate,

inexplicable dance of a blind -

if not massive - heedless & headless

needful proportion ...

(The good earth is an exhibitionist)

Instead of the usual poetic virtues of compression and exactitude, these poems manifest an amiable, jocular excess. The words move and sway, caught up in the cadence of his voice. This is Tuwhare at full cry. Like Miles Davis (whom Tuwhare addresses in a couple of jazz-inspired pieces), the poet improvises, playing his signature phrases, revelling in his characteristically anarchic shifts in tone.

One of the best new poems, A leaf in the wind, is elemental yet quietly personal. Tuwhare is probably the only contemporary New Zealand poet with the necessary earthiness and eloquence, not to mention nerve, to adopt the persona of a leaf:

The wind

has attached itself

to me, and even

though I am flying,

I go drily. I know

not where or how

I shall rest up tonight, pale-side-up

shiny-side-down? Well, questions

like that are a breeze ...

In many recent poems, Tuwhare converses with his earlier writing: Reign again is the latest in a succession of "rain" poems, Miles Davis carries on the conversation about self-expression that was begun 30 years earlier in Tuwhare's poem for his artist-friend, Hotere.

Even if the book feels more like a sketchbook than a series of finished paintings, it has vivaciousness, good humour and congeniality to give away. Like Neruda, Tuwhare is a poet of physical love and passion, of food and friendship. At once direct and obfuscated, joking and serious, his poems continue to make their own rules.

Godwit

$29.95

* Gregory O'Brien is a Wellington poet.