No Ordinary Sun

This book contains a careful selection of the poems of Hone Tuwhare, the best-known poet of Maori descent writing in English. Tuwhare’s style owes something to free verse tradition, something (whether or not the author is bilingual) to the energy and natural metaphors of Maori speech, and only its faults to a certain debris absorbed from versifiers less gifted than himself. When Tuwhare is boldest and most his own master, he breaks all nets of imitation with a bare statement of the condition of man:

I have learned to love
too much perhaps
rough tracks hard of going
poorly lit by stars . . .

or –

East Wind
do not rage your brothers
to a harsh awakening.
Hush me
to a Tuesday’s blossoming tree
and the wild orchard
where I shall find her . . .

or –

But I heard her with the wind
crooning in the hung wires
and caught her beauty by the coffin
muted to a softer pain –
in the calm vigil of hands
in the green-leaved anguish
of the bowed heads
of old women . . .

The last quotation I have given here, from the poem ‘Tangi’, would lose much of its meaning for a reader who lacked knowledge of Maori funeral ceremonies, and especially the carrying of green leaves by the mourners. And this raises the point of possible obscurity. Has Tuwhare the right to use images whose meaning will be inaccessible to those who are ignorant of Maori thought and custom? I think he has that right, since greater richness comes from the double level of symbolism; and a reader worth his salt would be ledpage 687 to study and enquiry. Furthermore, Tuwhare is ploughing a new paddock, where Maori and pakeha frontiers mingle, a steep stony paddock that needs the double-handled hillside plough.

The keynote of Tuwhare’s writing is an uncommon emotional honesty. There is hardly a trace of padding, of constructed abstract comment in his work. As a result he writes either superbly (as, for example, in ‘Roads’, ‘Tangi’, ‘A Disciple Dreams’, ‘Monologue’, ‘Moon Daughter’, ‘The Girl in the Park’, ‘Importune the East Wind’) or imperfectly, with a cluster of fragments, true in themselves but not joined in a total unity. There is no middle road of the merely competent; and the reader has the advantage of knowing that the reality prior to the poem is never faked or invented. Each poem is alive from start to finish.

Tuwhare’s verse could be admired for reasons outside the value of the poems themselves – because he is Maori (a reason for the keen racialist); because he is a man who works with his hands (a reason for the romantic Leftist) – but these things are in the long run irrelevant. It is certainly true that he uses the English language with a new slant, a new emotional element, from a Maori point of view; and his occupation may deliver him from the academic vices. But the best poems stand beyond this, on their own merits, as authentic personal intuitions of the meaning of life and death. I find Tuwhare’s work most nearly perfect when he deals with the relationship of men and women, or alternately with the inner darkness and poverty experienced by a modern man who is gripped by the mechanical necessities of Western life. The shock of warmth and discovery, as one reads these poems, happens again and again.

1964 (331)