Book Review: Luxembourg, by Stephen Oliver

Available in selected bookshops. 

Luxembourg – Google it to find a tiny European state with spires that point to infinity, cobbled streets, canels through the city. But the blurb on this collection of poems draws us away from Luxembourg, telling us that these are the poems of a New Zealand poet returning home after twenty years in Australia. It’s hard to ignore the word hiding in plain sight in the title – lux – meaning light. Indeed, there are stars and sunsets, twilights – in many poems the light carries with it a ‘darkening into dawn’ of old world versus new. Perhaps the light is the light of understanding.

I might start by saying that my mum picked up the book from my shelf and was unimpressed with the first page’s description of ‘Desiccated, middle-aged matriarchs’, in the poem Dreams of Flying. Further in, in a poem called Undercover I found:

…This is rural New
Zealand, where every woman over forty
looks like Janet Frame in a parallel universe
of the under privileged… 

These gripes aside, Oliver has a well-respected place in Australasian poetry. It seems a ripe time to admit that these are the first poems of Oliver’s which I have read (though this is his nineteenth collecton). It is on the basis of this collection that I call him a landscape poet. He writes about people, but it is in his consideration and depiction of the hills and valleys, skies and trees, that the poems carry the most beauty, weight, and originality of phrase. The poet’s language and eye is that of the painter as sights are drawn, spilt like paint on canvas rather than described, as in the poem Undercover:

The moon was half. As though the act
of clearing a space in the partially clouded
sky had worn itself away…
…The glass bowl tilts overhead

In the poem Road Notes, there is ‘fog / broiling off rounded hills’, the poplars rising ‘wind washed’. The ordinary sometimes appears; in the poem Dilapidated Dream – the poplars are ‘sentinels’, but also the stunning, as in the poem In the Blink: ‘Drought is the story of absences, equidistant / and everywhere.’ In the poem Apocrypha, Oliver describes houses like ‘a handful of croutons thrown over lumped up hills’. Descriptions of ideas are also catching, as in the poem Road Notes: ‘Memory has pulled tent pegs and moved on. / A sadness of light is all that remains, the mould broken’.

With the exception of a few poems close to the end of the book which caught me with their real feeling and humanness (the poem The Lost German Girl, and the closing lament for the friend who has died), the people in this book seem to be mostly vessels for the poems’ ideas. Not that the human is absent – fossils are ‘substances by which we sense / ourselves’. But the poems are highly intellectual, philosophical, scientific even, asking how and why we exist – Oliver is a name-dropper, a myth-dropper, a place-dropper. I needed a dictionary. The translation of the title poem, ‘Luxembourg’, into German is a nice touch, and the occasional Spanish or Latin phrase contributes to a feeling of intense working. The book is interposed with prose poems, a form growing in popularity. These tell stories and develop character, following a similar rhythm to the free verse which is more numerous.

Places in New Zealand appear – Te Kuiti, Piopio – I am happy to find the poet on the West Coast. But they submerge beneath the ripples of global citizenship that dominates Luxembourg. I keep coming back to the question, what lies at the heart of this collection? Why is it by the lamplights of Luxembourg or Europe or even Alaska that the poems choose to find a place in the world? It will take more than my two readings to interpret the heart of Luxembourg.

I do love the cover, and I’ll admit that as an old-fashioned romantic who loves landscape descriptions I chose the book because of its cover – the opera singer rendered in black and white, her heavy made-up, haunting eyes, staring into the unknown. She seems set in time – quite unlike these poems.

Reviewed by Susannah Whaley

Luxembourg
by Stephen Oliver
Published by Greywacke Press
ISBN 9780646986968

Chapbook Review: Broadsheet 16, featuring Stephen Oliver

Available in selected stores nationwide.

Volume 16 of Broadsheet, November 2015, is an instalment in honour of Australasian poet, Stephen Oliver, for his contribution to trans-tasman poetry. The volume therefore features Oliver’s work, along with poetry from his friends and contacts and a few contributions outside of the theme.

Oliver’s poems are placed in the middle of the volume, with other poets and their writing flowing out of this central feature. One of these poems was Pavel Arsenev’s Translator’s Note, a lovely piece at the start of the issue that worked through the processes of thought. Similar to the way in which a translation is undertaken, the poem explores the way we try to comprehend and understand: “I feel fear. / I am afraid of something, but I don’t know what.”

Oliver’s own poems are both sweet and quirky. This Way Out describes a lush landscape, from fossil to mountain range, and ends with the beautiful image of “Orpheus as he plays / so high and sweet on his moon bone flute”. Another one of his poems included, Lace, has the same light and airy tone as it captures the image of a woman in her home. It is an everyday scene, but Oliver alights it with touches of beauty; the curtains are made of lace and she, too, is described as bright as a dream.

The selection of Oliver’s poems in this issue are proof that he can pull off both the comical and the more poignant side of poetry. Poetry Day Blues is a more casual piece of work, with Oliver using rhyme to create a jaunty little poem about the happenings of National Poetry Day. In a Doctor Seuss-esque rhythm, he describes “Poems on pavements, poems on walls, / Poems at bus stops, poems in halls”. His poem The Departed Guest, meanwhile, returns to more serious themes and encompasses an empty mind as “an abandoned amphitheater”; it describes an intangible loss of knowledge and memory that goes beyond the physical.

Other poems of note were two pieces written by Nicholas Reid. The poem King of Comedy contemplates how time seems to forever click onwards, taking the scene from antique skyscrapers to Vespa scooters and then to the city traffic of Los Angeles. Reid’s poem Ars Amoris was one of my favourite poems in Broadsheet 16, and talks about art and love and the inevitable way they twist and turn around each other. He describes how the art of love can be sonnets, a “plumage of birds in a downriver drift”, the sound of Mozart. And in the final verse, Reid finally talks of how love is also “old you, old me, old us”, a soft and precise ending that closes off the poem nicely.

Broadsheet 16 is a wonderful instalment of various poets, with many writers I had not come across before previously. This little and affordable chapbook promises a collection of new New Zealand poetry and it does not fail to deliver.

Reviewed by Emma Shi

Broadsheet 16
edited by Mark Pirie
Published by The Night Press
ISSN 11787808