Spending a fair amount of time on my own, as I do, in the Highlands of Scotland, I discover in myself a mighty will to forge patterns. The landscape is empty here – from the windows at the back of the house I see hills, and to walk out is to walk into a view comprising only the river, strath and moorland that is spread beneath them. All is in shades of grey green, ochre, purple, dun. There is restraint, a pared back presentation of colour and detail and little in the way of interference with the great plainness of things, the utter simplicity of that which is laid out before me.

Then my eye adjusts; I start to see variety. Next thing, imagination has answered the appearance of a chastened landscape with the gift of its generative powers: so, for example, now here I am, at that same window, looking over, say, an eighteenth-entury English parkland. For that scattering of Highland birch trees down there on the flat could be, easily, in this particular light, on this day, a planting by Capability Brown of mighty oaks. Or, in the same way, I can see up there on the hill a set of classical ruins, the remains of a marble temple though made of a chunk of Sutherland rock… This is the sort of thing that goes on. The focus keeps re-aligning, the mind giving fresh readings of a cluster of wild flowers so that, on a long and lonely walk, these seem as intricate and brightly put together as a bouquet of raspberry, mint and cornflower seen, set next to a spray of bright buttercups, in the plate glass window of a Parisian florist.


This constant imaginative re-arrangement of the things around me… It’s a force to be reckoned with. Lack becomes abundance. Limitation, richness. If I could write as I see, I think, my work might become poetry, not fiction. I might find myself going to the collections of poems by Vincent O’Sullivan and Diana Bridge to figure out how they do it, take from the stock of their ‘available reality’ – to alter slightly and paraphrase the words of R.P. Blackmur – and loosen it into a fullness. From them I might come to learn how they manage the beautiful act of transforming experience into stanzas, so as to multiply it, make of their little rooms an everywhere.

For poetry is all about that sort of thing, I know – there’s John Donne helping me with the sentence I just wrote. Poetry does the heavy lifting of the imagination, all right. But what I want to think about here, as I come to recent work by these two New Zealand poets, is not so much the technique of their poesis – the motifs, the styles, structures and rhythmic schemes chosen and their outcomes – as the sensibility underlying the making in the first place. where does this come from? What shapes and patterns seen – what means of figuring – have forced its resulting in this poem, or that? Wonderful poetry, at the end of the day, is straightforward enough to prove and critique and champion – though I am no poetry critic – but that is not my intention for this essay. No. What I want to do is get beside these poems, behind them… I want to become… within. I have two collections here: Deep Colour by Diana Bridge, and Still Is, the last published by Vincent O’Sullivan, who died earlier this year,¹ and I want to find out why I’m so taken with them. I want to discover what it is about this work that speaks so powerfully to me as I go about day-to-day life on my Sutherland hill.


Here’s the first line of ‘From here then, shall we?’, the first poem of Vincent O’Sullivan’s last. ‘Freedom and Fate so raring to make a break’, he begins, not quite allowing them to: ‘Wanting to be lovers, to lie exhausted with each other…’ he goes on, but thinking of their offspring as never quite taking off either; they represent both ‘Canter and Whoa’. At which point the poem seems to stop. The tone shifts. Then:

… I always imagine, seeing photos
of Rodin’s Thinker, that is what he goes
over and over, his knee aching, his marble
elbow pressing, ‘Think harder!’ Fated
and free whatever he comes up with.

It seems, altogether, I am being given a lesson here. I am being reminded that, despite the poetry’s free-ranging allusions to all that is out there, read, thought about and seen, there is value in a certain form of expression that doesn’t try and make things up in order to add to a poem, to give it force and create attention. The subject of the verse just allows the speaker to see more in it, that’s all, or further, than what might be ordinarily apparent. It’s as though, I’m coming to read, that by keeping things quiet – the Sutherland landscape, as it were, simply out there, as it’s always been – you can say quite a lot. As though the modesty of the sensibility, the plainness of its expression, makes space for a greater attention to be paid. So, of course – just as my hills here remind me – it wouldn’t want extravagance. It just wants things to… be –

That phrase ‘fated and free’… For me, it’s a good place to start. Held back by the ‘whoa’… And then art allows us to rush on towards completion, to answer the question ‘Shall we?’ and after all the questioning – Why? Why not? – be at rest. Without the restraint, the poem seems to say, where would be the hurry? The emphasis of ‘From here then, shall we?’ comes entirely from its unemphatic nature; the poem wants to be relaxed, to make no grand gestures, cause no fuss. There’s a world in the background – photographs, art and a hint of classical storytelling – but no dramatic show and tell.

‘The dark’s gift, with thanks’, that begins with a name check to Borges, strikes the same note. Its ideas and references are drawn in – an ‘insipid world’ versus one that might be a ‘gift’, with both versions held steady by ‘What may / have been, fading away with light’ – and then simply released. There appears ‘the moment’s / jolt’; the blind artist’s mind containing both home and away: ‘The world no more than a marble in his pocket’:

as standing by a thin creek
In Austin, Texas, the blind Borges,
Homesick for his sightless Rio Plata,
Thanked his host, ‘At last I’ve been there.’

And if, as a result, the ordinary becomes extraordinary… Well, O’Sullivan writes. That’s what happens, I suppose. Being here in Sutherland is also teaching me that.


Diana Bridge is off on a similar mission to find something infinite caught within limitation. ‘Somewhere down there in the aquarium, gleaming’ begins her opening title poem, ‘the words for it… out of range.’ Yet, look – the words are here, different words perhaps, but sensuous, flickering alive… a ‘tiny floating scarf of fin’, a ‘twist of colour’ set next to the atrocities of loss, of the places of no words, or the wrong words – ‘the murk of the tank’, the appalling ‘single bed’. While the poem tells us that ‘Day after day / the past waits for the present to fall / into its hands’ – the actual present tense of it seems to live forever. Here is elegy: words for absence richly present as a tiny movement of bright neon in the dark. ‘If the thought really yielded to the object’, Bridge quotes Adorno in her epigraph, ‘if its attention were on the object, not on its category, the very objects would start talking under its lingering eye.’ So much for abstractions, then. I feel the same way, regarding the endlessness of land and light… for what can one possibly do with these? Instead, here in her poem, the infinity of loss, the failure of language to answer to it, has been replaced by the very palpable infinities of Bridge’s moments of being. ‘Deep Colour’, poem and collection, is full of them.

Altogether, I’m really starting to believe I am not so alone up here in the Eastern Highlands, after all. Details, as Bridge is showing me, are all. In ‘Singapore shapes’ I read:

Her pram is a walled garden open to everything that waves
in spikes and fronds over her head. She is assembling
her own legacy of shapes, caped shoulders, trumpet mouths,
marbles of monsoon rain. Driven as Eve,
she reaches for the gloss on leaves…

– and can almost literally ‘see’ in the assemblage of nouns here (that prelapsarian ‘gloss’!) the human action of placing experience and knowledge over the natural – to capture it, name it, reach out to what is out there to hold on to, to want to touch and keep while ‘Frangipani flowers fall’, and ‘birds / are the red-and-yellow of new memories’. Clearly work has been done to want to imagine the apprehending, remembering, dreaming experience of seeing the world as though for the first time as something to make sense of, as well as enjoy. To represent so beautifully the pattern of the ‘category called “movement”’, ‘a place for still and never still…’ in a poem about a mother and a tiny baby in her pram, outside in the light, to fashion that kind of… exquisite – out of a garden, all the individual pieces placed and arranged… Oh yes, I see it , I do. Bridge’s ‘A split sky’, following ‘Deep Colour’, makes explicit that shaping and organising principle behind the poet’s action and speech: ‘I call on splinters of conversation’ she writes:

snippets
of scene re-open them to view

then piece them back into some new
assemblage which works only to expose
fresh vacancies

As with O’Sullivan’s, these poems, too, given the quietness of their assemblage – not even daring, in this instance, so much as a speck of punctuation to lend any certainties or enclosures – show their emerging themes as arriving almost by surprise: ‘the split sky… material in a way she cannot be’ the speaker observes, ‘the joining and / the severing endlessly renew’. How quiet it is, to be inside these verses. There’s no fanfare, no fuss… Only joining, severing… To live in a chastened landscape is to understand what it is to come out of and return to a feeling of experiencing something out of nothing. To have while one has not. It plays as elegy here, in this poem of Diana Bridge, but in fact it seems to be the case that what I am being guided to think more and more is that perhaps not being overwhelmed by stimulus is to feel the beginning of it starting to stir. There’s a shift, Bridge writes, from shadow to something like a ‘scene above our heads’. Whatever the poem or its event, whatever it is made of, something is about to happen and it’s going to be amazing.


In my quest, then, to trace not only the outline but to get at the heft of that classical temple I mentioned earlier - broken doric columns and a porch made of peaty earth and crag filled in with heather – I do feel inclined to keep these slim volumes with me. ‘Deep Colour’, and its profound desire to make a richly ornate object out of the quotidian, as though to embroider over with fine bright silks the unrelenting sameness of so much of our experience; and Still Is, which shows me that an everyday voice that sounds like prose can actually, paraphrasing Woolf this time, ‘chant elegy’ (‘Not to speak of prose lightly’ is indeed the title of one of the verses in O’Sullivan’ s collection)... Both publications are starting to feel like necessary companions as I develop my own thinking about what it is to make something of the world – that is, to make something that is worldly, tangible and precious and with exchange value that I can share with others – of my limited stock. This stuff of hill and water and rock that I have to hand, it turns out, as I learn from my teachers here, really might be fit to serve.

As Bridge shows us in her collection, it can be possible to find plenitude and an entire civilisation within a few strokes of pen on paper – her work in translation across Eastern poetry and its influence, here represented in her version of Japanese tanka and responses to eighteenth-century woodblock prints in sections named ‘Utamaro’s Objects’ and ‘Fifteen Poems on Things: Translation’, is evidence of that. But how she turns that aesthetic of the ‘other’ into her own version of the everyday shows us, in the places she gives us in these poems – East, West, and in the midst of the New Zealand bush – those ‘gleams’ again, those points of detail, of colour; a thing seen but put together in a different way. ‘A scrawny southern rata sways outside a hut’ we read in ‘Irish girls’ and ‘Just before darkness, the tree is transformed’. In a poem full of so many recognisable moments – the suggestion of a well-known myth, a girl’s disappearance and re-appearance, the play of dark and light with the pulling up of the blind to show the brightness of the day, along with a shadowy reminder of the voices, the sound, of an old Ireland… Out of these materials Diana Bridge unfurls a cloth woven so fine you can see the world through it, as well as the world looking back at us – different from how it was before, shining through from the other side of the weave.


So in all, yes, I do think I think I might be starting to assemble the pieces that I can set into a tessellated floor of some marvel up here in the hills, where in actuality there is little in the way of buildings or anything much like a sign of Western civilisation at all! For I am now seeing the colours, the baroque curls and glints at the edges of the otherwise ordinary… everywhere! Is this what these poems have been instructing me in? Doing more than demonstrating beauty, I mean, but showing me how, in life, I might attain it? So to make of the everyday the wonderful as a kind of artistic practice, one might say, a form of prayer, even? Both these writers gift day-to-day language with the richness drawn from their poems’ ‘rooms’ – and in so doing make me think more appreciatively of everyday expression, everyday event, everyday… life.

In O’Sullivan’s ‘Come again’ a child observes ‘the head that changes shadow’, a cast of a Greek sculpture that ‘half smiles at you and her cheek / crinkles’ when the light shifts around it. An ordinary interaction – grandfather and granddaughter talking in a clothes shop – is elevated by a touch of ‘Ozymandias’; big ideas all round while browsing through the racks of pre-teen tops and trousers. What is held back here – tenderness, intimacy, along with those vast sands of desert time – is also expressed. In the same way, then, as I know that to adumbrate the plain extends such pleasure (that florist’s plate glass window in Paris, again!; Bridge’s finely woven cloth!), describing the very magnificent can also be talked about, as O’Sullivan shows, in quite ordinary scenes. This is another lesson in learning what to have in and what to leave out. In Still is, in order to amplify, one quietens. To convey is to restrain. Poetry, prose. Prose, poetry… The key, the way in to discovering this way of seeing – and, I am also realising by now, of hearing, of speaking and of singing the world – is here turning in its magical lock as my view beyond my high window transforms itself from empty strath into an Eden traced with a river of gold…

Whew! There’s patterning, all right! My double vision coming into sight – and some. But the will to metaphor, says Denis Donoghue in his marvellous book on the subject, is powerful and real – and whether on a hillside or in a poem, my looking for an alternative history to connect with an idea, to find a context to set it in that comes from a somewhere else outside it, this matches entirely I.A. Richards’s concept of ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’, as Donoghue reminds us. Metaphor is a basic element of our speech and imagination.

Certainly in the work of Bridge and O’Sullivan, both poets who tackle the subjects born out of the New Zealand they write from – a place where, as Bridge writes ‘“Bush” is the kind of diminutive that doesn't let on' while bringing in at the same time (etc etc to ) elsewhere - we see the busy hand of metaphor rearranging the furniture of the world. One might think that what is going on here accords with a retelling of that familiar and now somewhat obsolete story of new world in thrall to the old², the sensibility of the colonial written over by the sophisticate. Such split sensibility might appear, in O’Sullivan’s case, to be represented by some of his poems’ titles, even – those I mentioned earlier as well as examples such as ‘either isn’t or is’, ‘He so comes to mind, insistent as’ or ‘Solidarity, for you’ with their somewhat chiasmatic facings-off of one version of an idea against the other. But Donoghue is inspirational when he urges his readers to go beyond that kind of bifurcation. A vehicle only becomes ‘excessive’ when it ‘takes possession of the discourse and makes argument about it impossible’, he says. Why should the thing (thynge – unfinished, in Old English, an incomplete idea) be poor when the metaphor for it is so rich? Who said there was a hierarchy in all this? That one side of an idea, its word, and world, be more interesting than the other? That it might – what? – eclipse it altogether?


O’Sullivan has spent a lifetime drawing both Northern and Southern hemispheres together in his work – the novels and short stories, the Katherine Mansfield scholarship – but in the poetry especially. Diana Bridge, a good friend of O’Sullivan, seems to have drawn lessons from his conjoining vision in the expression of her own deeply cultured poetics, intricate in their bringing together of influence, language and ancient Eastern motifs. And, for my part, I have learned from them both – just as I have learned to acknowledge my own will to bring in the worldly to take up a place upon my belovedly remote hill: ‘These peaks are half robed, stage goddesses’ writes Diana Bridge in ‘We are not accountable for myth’, as though echoing back to me across the miles… I see what you see…. She and O’Sullivan, both, understand that empty hills can also be fully populated by anything we want to give them, anything at all, taken from any old poem or story or image or idea, and not be any the less empty. Both versions simply converge within the glass of our seeing, come forward, take shape and outline, and jump cleanly into view – this world and the time we have to live in it – and all at once.


Postscript

The recent death of Vincent O’Sullivan, poet laureate, scholar, teacher, librettist, novelist, critic, editor, knighted for services to literature, giver of gifts, as New Zealand poet Lynley Edmeades put it in the introduction to her eulogy for O’Sullivan delivered at St Mary of the Angels in Wellington in April, has torn its own shape out of the fabric of New Zealand letters.³ ‘We are still all living alongside him’, writes Diana Bridge, who counts O’ Sullivan’s gift to her of his confidence in her own work as being the means by which she was able to start writing. For my part, I remember being at a reading with him in Dunedin, the city in New Zealand where he came to live, a nineenth-century settlement just outside it, with hills and inlets and heavy stone built cottages that made me think of Scotland - not so much the Scotland of my East Sutherland but of over in the West, with its pubs and village ports set down busily by the sea. After the event, when we’d answered the questions and signed our books, and were over the road having a cup of tea, Vincent told me of his delight in noticing, when he’d been in Athens, that there were vans with ‘Metaforia’ written on the side. They were driving all over the city; they were the vehicles of furniture moving companies. That was it entirely, I remember the pleasure he took in it. ‘A regular old van moving stuff from one place to another.’ Priceless? Ordinary? Somewhere in between? Doesn’t matter. It was the going from one place to another that was important. Taking it from here to there. And maybe back again.


Works cited:

Still Is, Vincent O’Sullivan, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024
Deep Colour, Diana Bridge, The University of Otago Press, 2023
Metaphor, Denis Donoghue, Harvard University Press, 2014

1. See obituary in PNR 278
2. Recent work by Gregory O’Brien, see especially Always Song in the Water, Maritime Museum Press, is a compelling reminder of the new New Zealand, set within its own axis as described equally by Bill Manhire, Anna Jackson, Megan Kitching and a whole host of Aotearoan poets.
3. ‘O’Sullivan’s “hail, well met empiricist” is constantly working at metaphysical themes’, wrote Chris Miller in an issue of the Warwick Review some twelve years ago, a number given over to showcasing New Zealand literature and highlighting the poet’s contribution to it. ‘A very dear and immensely gifted man has left us’, the Review’s Editor, Michael Hulse, wrote to me. ‘These wonderful friends who write so formidably are passing from the world.’ He adds ‘No one suggests that intelligence and sensitivity will perish from the earth with them, and yet…’