Stephen Oliver

“ The sky tries hard to reveal itself as bluestone, but temperature and wrappings of cloud are against it. Rain falls hard as luck. Here you will see them lift up, a squadron of pigeons swinging to gun the light, wings ablaze, the bulky horizon thunderous where thunder lies cognisant. The Great Dividing Range runs this way and I am on the leeside toward the sea. The setting sun awakens our ancestral demand for bonfires big as cities, and a leisurely parade of gulls passing overhead mistake the darkening hours for seacliffs. ”

“ Aetna to the Port of Catania in a blood-boiling swerve to the red-chequered table, and the fishing boats in the blue dusk. Woody Allen steps from the screen to the dead crystal lakes of Sweden. A floppy disc of moon lies reflected there in an Excalibur beam of light. Clouds, too. Those ancient purities across my triptych window-view-of-the-sky package air as light as styrofoam. The lighthouse beam chills the sandhills and oceans gather up whale breath to cloud. Our civilisation bartered on the whales back. Love undrinkable as water. ”

“ It is a sequence which is not afraid to take on Stevens, or Milton and Hardy and Auden. But I would like to see it slightly reshaped, for I feel that there is a great poem hiding in here somewhere, if only I could be persuaded more of its motivation. I think fear does lie at the heart of its psychology, but the real fear is artistic rather than political; and if this could be worked more into the texture of the poem, along with some editing of the poem’s middle section, we would have a major achievement not only in Oliver’s oeuvre, but in antipodean writing. ”

“ Senegal, Nigeria, West Africa, the sun dangerous as a forty-gallon drum. Drums stacked on rotting pallets in the back yard of tropical forests. Drums swollen like the bellies of starved children with toxic waste.
The Berlin Wall is falling down, each chunk a souvenir sponsored by Smirnoff. Who was that poet who whispered, Death is a maestro from Germany. Away in America, Raymond Carver, as the provinces of his body revolted, gasped our daily losses from ruined lungs. It comes down to love, he said. What we hear is anger in its orbit.
Falling piano notes. The last of the rain down brickwork. ”

“ Remember, you’re not writing bus-timetables and calling it ‘performance poetry’ like a few I could name. Stick with the atmospherics, the true essence of people. That’s your angle, as mine is now to brow beat you. ”

“ At a small village not far from Manila, in the house of armaments & munitions, in a house of grenades & ammunition, the plaster statue of the Virgin Mary as humble as a trademark, stands splashed in carmine tears like some peasant shot on a quiet morning bearing water from the creek. The hovels strewn about the hills are so many broken boxes. The sun is spinning clockwise for hope. One cloud out of nowhere & then a drape of blue that might be the sky. The gathering of people is more impressive than a food drop. ”

“ We live under a Niagra
of star fall, huge optics dilate time,
blackness like velvet slips over
chrome. Sounds of nothingness
strung between a singlet of lights. (lyric 30) .
This is vintage Oliver. The language is elaborate, but perfectly judged, undercut by a colloquial impulse (‘black as the ace of spades’, ‘for the hell / of it’) . This undersong speaks of Oliver’s awareness of his place as a poet of the vernacular republic; but it also speaks, in its use of cliche, of a loss of faith in the resources of poetic language. ”

“ The conning-tower signals:
which came first, meaning or memory?
One flashlight winks hungrily under seacliffs, and then the flare. This setting becomes an habitual space, chosen era for commando or smuggler.
We make our choice, learn that grief comes regular as sunset.
The bow-wave turned in chrome coils as the coastline dropped from view.
Once in a metal-etched hour, people ran away to America to buildings the colour of gun-metal, to a sidewalk venting steam about the ankles of sable-stockinged girls.
How many of us cannot begin the adventure of the day upon its arrival? ”

“ The short, broad streets are abandoned early to the blue phosphorescence of the TV and the evening rustle of newspapers. Tomorrow, of course, is uninhabited and fresh as a childs drawing. Further on through the minutes someone is hard at a hammer as if wanting to be let in. A news bulletin tells of avenues long as decades in a steepled town where tanks gather, ready to break through a hay barn in Kosovo. (Remember the Revolutionary Poet who broke through a crowd?) No, this is only a rusted keel upended in the quarter-acre back yard. ”

“ The stanza alludes to Stevens’s Jove, a false divinity who ‘moved among us, as a muttering king’ in ‘Sunday Morning’, and to that poem’s existential conclusion that (contra Milton) ‘We live in an old chaos of the sun’. Like Stevens in ‘Key West’, Oliver laments the ‘Blessed rage for order’, the ‘glassy lights’ which gave a bogus sense of structure to the sea. But in a sense, and an important sense, much of the language of Oliver’s stanza is the language of Stevens: it is an eloquent testament to a failure to find in the present a viable voice for poetry. ”

“ In this clear cut country, snap your fingers, watch sound bounce off rock. He dreams that one profound thought unspoken will change the minds of humankind. O America! a poet is a detective shadowing himself. ”

“ You’re not a poet for all time but for your own time. Don’t worry about it. And forget those supposed poets the M=E=Z=Z=A=N=I=N=E=S as you call them caught between the floors: they ain’t going nowhere. So get up and make a cup of tea!” “Sure, care to join me?” “Only for a minute,” he said, “I’ve got more important things to do today, like glinting off the Hauraki Gulf and the iron-clad poppy of Sydney Tower. ”

“ So agile & aerial, a mermaid of the trapeze, star act of an old fashioned circus. A picture framed in time within the bleak cabaret of youth: he uniform crisp & she in sequined tights with her angels Wings of Desire flared from bared shoulder-blades. They are holding hands in celebration of the letter M. Now, married into age & ageless on an ancient Island, theirs is a love old as childhood & wise as water. Solidly based as the fist-backed rock of Uluru. ”

“ Each waking is a starting out from the old country.
The responsibility of light beckons, unclothes the familiar objects and not so familiar ones.
Lightning leaves the expression surprised and the lone tree in the paddock startled with cinematic glare, unharmed and lovely.
In a homely way, the headlights sweep the back yard hovering over the roped-swing in the pelting rain and neighbourhood of cat & dog. This tells you that the family
is in deep trouble to be called into account in afteryears while the shutters slap wettish to little effect. ”

“ For while he is adept at finding occasion for the lyrical richness of which modernism was always suspicious, he also writes at times in a spare modern voice, as in the following lines which may owe something to the New Zealand poet Curnow’s ‘Canto of Signs’:
Rubbed off sky exposes an
undercoat of white that is really
fuzzed, mid-day heat. Birds
change over shifts. Things settle.
Shadow drops under eaves, tier
by tier .... (lyric 32)
The language here has a powerful antipodean flatness, and depends on its laconic pauses. ”

“ Most of us just bash the trees without seeing the kangaroos. You saw living mostly for what it is, a part-time job with bugger all security; the occasional softness of a woman, maybe, and of course grog by the bucketful. What was it you saw at the last, Dave, when passing through the ripped canvas of a thunderstorm, lightning flashing down the Hawkesbury, a good belt of rain after? ”

“ Oliver’s other new collection, Deadly Pollen, is an ambitious undertaking - a meditation, in large measure, on Wallace Stevens and his legacy - and brings together thirty-five short lyrics into a loosely linked sequence which examines the state of the world after 9/11. And the poem is not ‘merely’ political, for it diagnoses a state of spiritual malaise based on fear, a state of crisis in which the role of the poet is in question. ”

“ Heat rises from the grid of these sidewalks and the spirits of the Indian, afraid enough of death to die, whoop it up around the big campfires. I wake, uncomfortable in the lurk of a dream, and my breath draws up hope like an anchor, lifts my thoughts into the day where I follow. ”

“ The poem prints -
makes a seal of every season,
its message delivered and read.
An Actual Encounter With The Sun On My Balcony At France Street ( for Gloria Schwartz ) When the moon slipped its knot and left a ring for the night to drop through, and a baggage of stars thudded on the loading bay at the other side of the world, I heard, “Ho! get up you slack-arse poet, I want to have a word with you.” It was the sun. “This is a surprise,” I yawned. “Shouldn’t be - you’re the one whose been whingeing about his own personal light.” “I must admit,” I conceded, “I was worried there for a bit.” ”

“ Lost to the familiar, Age moved us out of living memory, unlike those tribes, the autochthons who saw the earths infancy still. Let us go, you & I, to re-invent the damage and call it discovery, to uniformly lift up our cry in schadenfreude, meek before Great Cities that bend as fenders to the glare. ”