Spirit in a strange land: A selection of New Zealand spiritual verse

By PENELOPE BIEDER

Designed to fill a gap for both ordinary reader and student alike, this attractive volume reaches back over a century. Most, however, come from diverse collections published in the past four decades, and include the familiar names of New Zealand poetry - J.K. Baxter, Allen Curnow, Vincent O'Sullivan, Lauris Edmond, Sam Hunt, Elizabeth Smither, C.K. Stead, Kendrick Smithyman. More rarely heard voices are also included.

It is thoughtfully divided into seven sections: Godzone; Holidays & Holy Days; Saints & Sinners; Troubled Souls; Jesus Alone; Book of the Land; Rebels & Recluses. This helps the reader to see past the cross in the landscape, past New Zealand's early restricting Christian colonisation and the historic complicity of the Church with the State.

The post-war period has seen the decline of religion in New Zealand which has allowed writers, painters and composers freedom to create their own forms of spirituality as they struggle with their connection to the land.

From artist Colin McCahon came his celebrated saying: "I saw an angel in this land." And from fellow painter Toss Woollaston the observation that could also apply to the poets represented here: "I believe the Bible is as good a textbook for art as religion ... "

James K. Baxter wrote hopefully in Five Sestinas, one of which (Winter in Jerusalem) is reprinted in this edition:

"Where many men gather

From need or friendship, truth begins to waken

As eels rise in the dark river."

A few pages later comes a pessimistic echo from Lauris Edmond's Wellington Letter, also excerpted:

"In this land of giant angularities

how we cultivate the middle distances;

tame and self-forgiving, how easily

we turn on one another, cold or brutish

towards the weak, the too superior ... "

Both these excerpts appear in the Book of the Land section and both suggest that the landscape has shaped us and our responses to our self-awareness as people together and people alone.

What struck me about this selection is the intensity and passion of the poems.

There is wonderful dry humour - Baxter's challenge to Lloyd Geering in Thoughts on Ecumenism (July, 1966) is cheerfully answered a month later by Geering's poem Celestial Greetings.

Kevin Ireland's The Man Who Became a Religion sees "that he was the right man/in the wrong prophecy".

And there is a deep searching sadness in many of the poems. From Gary McCormick's Lost at Sea in the Jesus Alone section:

"Over the desert a wind is howling.

My eyes are going, my hands are blistered.

The room is burning.

Soon it will rain.

It must."

The three editors are established academics - Paul Morris and Mike Grimshaw in Religious Studies, and Harry Ricketts in English Literature - and the book concludes with an essay by Morris in which he argues that one cannot rediscover one's Celtic or other roots alone, but only by recovering one's community. He suggests that "the authenticity of any form of spirituality is to be found in the construction of its cultural history. Spirituality always makes cultural and communal claims. Spirituality is cultural." This leaves out in the cold the secular, individual worship of nature, which is surely spiritual also.

What moved me in this collection was the gorgeous simplicity of words whose staying power in the mind represents a secular, spiritual strength.

What better image than Lauris Edmond's "old Ruapehu hunching its shoulders into a jacket of snow ... " or Baxter's "startled horse who plunges in the paddock/Above the nunnery."

Hopefully this collection will reach a wider audience than students of religion or those seeking a poem for a special occasion.

Published by Godwit, $39.95

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer.