McCahon poems come to light after decades

Verse written by painter Colin McCahon on the death of Rita Angus reveals both his skill as a wordsmith and his feeling for his fellow artist. MARGIE THOMSON reports.

How can I forget her face

Stern and kind, kind to friends

Seagulls, shells, stone

Kindness too to paint

too late now

I've never said it but have thanked you

for that light air in your painting

now around us.

So wrote New Zealand's most famous painter, Colin McCahon, in the first of a sequence of poems in memory of the painter Rita Angus, who died in 1970.

The seven poems together possibly indicate a greater depth of feeling and friendship between the two painters than has previously been suspected, so the discovery of the poems years after the death of McCahon is a fascinating footnote to the history of 20th century New Zealand art, and to the life of a man who, despite his use of the written word on his paintings, is not usually thought of as a wordsmith.

The poems have just been published for the first time, collected together in a handprinted, limited-edition booklet by the University of Auckland's Holloway Press, edited by Peter Simpson. Facsimiles of the originals in McCahon's handwriting are included.

Simpson first became aware of McCahon's efforts to write poetry when he was researching his book Answering Hark, examining the relationship between McCahon and poet John Caselberg.

In McCahon's letters to Caselberg were several references to the fact that, around 1972-73, he was writing much poetry, and his comments suggest that it was a new activity for him. In December 1972, for instance, he wrote: "I am writing a lot of poetry - heaps of it." And in early 1973 he wrote: "Please forgive my presumption in doing this and tear me up. I'm writing miles of poems. And I need help. I'm asking you for this please. Can you help me?"

Simpson believes it likely that the poems for Angus were written around this time.

But apart from one or two poems included by McCahon in the text of his letters, Simpson had not been able to track down or gain access to any others. So imagine his excitement the day he received a call from Kathlene Fogarty, of Auckland's FHE Gallery. Someone, she told him (and the identity of that "someone" remains a secret) had sent her a collection of McCahon poems and asked her to sell them. She had rung the right person.

Simpson is pleased to report that the university library is to buy the poems, and he instantly recognised them as "a great little project for the Holloway Press", a university-owned, hand-operated press which publishes books for the collectors' market - although, as it happens, following expressions of interest also from Wellington poet Greg O'Brien, the final product is a joint effort between the Holloway Press and the Fernbank Studio, designed and printed by Greg's brother, Brendan O'Brien.

Only 175 copies of Rita: Seven Poems by Colin McCahon have been printed, available at $60 each.

The poems were not received in any particular order, but Simpson has applied his considerable knowledge of McCahon's life to place them as best he can as a chronological narrative. Thus the poems begin with the one reproduced above, Christchurch: about 1939 - Sydney Thompson's flat, which refers to the time when McCahon and Angus met in Christchurch.

Next is Clifton: 1948. Angus lived at Clifton Hill, by Sumner Beach in Christchurch, for around 10 years and was often ill, enduring mental breakdown and ECT at Sunnyside, close to the time Janet Frame was famously incarcerated there. The publication's sole photo, of a young McCahon lounging insouciantly against an outer wall of a house, while Angus stands nearby in tartan slippers, looking past her physical prime, was probably taken around this time.

The following poems trace the painter's steps through Angus' years at Clifton, north to Titirangi where the McCahons moved in 1953 and where Angus presumably visited them on her way to Northland where she lived for some months, to Kaitaia, and then, finally, to Wellington where the two possibly met in 1968-69 when Angus was drawing the Bolton St cemetery tombstones which had been smashed and displaced by motorway construction.

"There's more information about their relationship in these poems than has ever been known before," Simpson says.

The main previously established link was to do with Angus' bristliness and resentment at being lumped together with McCahon and Toss Woollaston as a "trinity" of artistic heavyweights.

"She didn't like being written into art history in a fashion she didn't approve of," Simpson says. "She thought the connection of her with the other two was false."

But now it seems that an enduring, personal connection must have been established. Certainly, McCahon seems to have been preoccupied with Angus' death, and with the loss he experienced as a result.

Simpson is less surprised than you might expect at the discovery of McCahon-as-poet.

"Words were really important to him. He loved poetry. A lot of his closest friends were poets - Baxter, Brasch, Mason, Caselberg - and a lot of the people who most strongly supported him in his early career were poets. Brasch was his most important early collector.

"A lot of the early criticism of McCahon was written by poets.

"He was a very, very strong writer, fantastically good. In his letters a lot of the writing is extraordinarily eloquent and poetic. It's like poetry, so to find him writing poetry is not a surprise."

The last poem in the book, Us: Wellington, encapsulates McCahon's recurrent themes of both loss and survival - as well as a feeling of personal familiarity and warmth in language that Simpson describes as "deliberately enigmatic and private":

I thought we had lost you

My dear to destruction only we can make.

And this destruction is more

than I can take Knowing

We loved you -

The gravestone that

night - Oh Shine

but darkness flooded

our light

till morning understanding.

* The Holloway Press has also just published the first collection of poems by Maurice Duggan, more usually known as one of New Zealand's finest short-story writers. A Voice for the Minotaur is edited by Duggan's biographer, Ian Richards. There are 150 copies available, for $100 each. Both books can be ordered through The Holloway Press, C/- English Department, University of Auckland.