Satirical and elegiac

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gone: Satirical Poems: New & Selected by Stephen Oliver Stephen Conlon Satirical and elegiac Stephen Oliver. Gone: Satirical Poems: New & Selected. Canberra: Greywacke Press, 2016. Illustrated by Matt Ottley. A$18.95 ISBN 978-0-473-36004-7 My first encounter with Stephen Oliver was to see and hear him reading his poems at the Sandringham Hotel at the then-grungy [End Page 184] lower end of King Street, Newtown in the late 1980s. It was a Saturday afternoon, on a stage usually occupied by bands, and he was in his element as he engaged with the punters, giving as good as he received from them. This was no "Poets in the Park" gig, no audience of "peers" politely responding to one of their own. He, along with Vicki Viidikas, was reading to what most of the then poets around town in Sydney may have disparagingly referred to as swine before which their pearls were not to be spread. They were both relishing the incongruous situation as they were reading their work to a hostile or at least an unappreciative audience. Several decades later, reading Oliver's Gone: Satirical Poems: New & Selected, I realize how grotesque this "half forgotten, half remembered" (to use his image from the title poem of Oliver's combination of some of his old and new voices) past I share with the poet in that hotel may have been. Oliver is willing to immerse himself in the low as well as the high, and fittingly so for a poet with a taste for the grotesque. Satire, at least the kind that Oliver writes, could not be written any other way. There is nothing precious or prissy about the language of the poems. Again, from "Gone": Time accumulates like dust on a mat—old gas works by the tavern block the view,a popular spot for the post-pub screw;but in the end we grew quite sick of that. The images cut in many ways—the highs and lows of cultural cross-currents. Oliver's command of this code-switching technique is one of the secrets to the metamorphic power of these satires to bring the past back to life while also charting the ways that past has passed away. The poet's voice must be big enough to hold all of these times, places, people in it, as it reaches for those shocking cadences that only great art may achieve. Matt Ottley, the Australian award-winning children's book illustrator, adds even more depth to the resonances of orality in the poems with his black-and-white drawings. Ottley's dark visions in Gone give a complementary and sardonic response to many of the pieces. Satire itself may be a dead art, though in the current political climate, the announcement of such a death may be premature. Oliver's poems keep this voice alive, as he dialogues with Larkin, Auden, Byron, and Horace from the distant past and with Baxter and more contemporary poets in the present. The channels are there, in the prosody of the satires: the rollicking rhythms of ballads, the rhyme royal from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde appropriate for a poem in which his breaks with his own poetic influences are partly embodied in the rhyme scheme's allusion to the originator of that scheme. The notes at the end of the volume in a mock-academic tone demonstrate Oliver's knowledge of the forms he uses. Oliver's voices, as I recall them over the decades, are the same voices heard through a different amplifier in these satirical poems. In Montaigne's words about how he hears his own voice and wants his son's to be "a speech succulent and sinewy, brief and compressed, not so much dainty and well-combed as vehement and brusque," Oliver's tones could come from sixteenth-century provincial France as much as from Wellington, Dunedin, or Sydney. Montaigne would have recognized his voice as kindred. The reader of Oliver's satires needs to be well versed in the traditions of satire, the grotesque, parody, modern, classical, and ancient poetry, as well as the concrete details of the two worlds of New Zealand...