To Enlarge Reality

Those who listen to their radios for more than football results should know by now some of the special talents of Dora Somerville, through her dramatic monologues in a medium that moves midway between prose and poetry, sometimes tender, sometimes ferocious, and nearly always witty. Maui’s Farewell is a poem of much the same genre, with the difference that it draws boldly for its substance on Maori mythological material. To use Maori material well is the trickiest job of all for the New Zealand poet writing in English – the brief track of our literature is strewn with failures. One recent success in this field is Adele Schafer’s radio play, The Spiral Tattoo. I think that Dora Somerville has also succeeded triumphantly.

She takes the bull firmly by the horns, and introduces Maori maxims directly into the current of her poem, generally with an accompanying English rendering – and it is a tribute to her control that the effect is not one of pastiche or macaronics, but something like a rendering from an unknown Maori text. It is always her wit that saves her; a wit close to that of the Maori spirit itself, robust, ironic, and in its final origin metaphysical –

I shall leave the world of life and light behind,
Observe once more the curious blossoms
page 102 At the portals of the accessway
And penetrate the hidden places whence comes the living spirit
From the fountainhead of Hine.
This tactic will give me a new twist
To the old gimmick of the return to the womb.
For I am not fleeing reality;
I aim to enlarge it.
Kaua e whakaarohia te mahinga
otira te otinga.
The end justifies the means as you might say . . .

These are the words she puts into the mouth of Maui, before he takes his fatal journey into the thighs of the death goddess, Hine-nui-te-po; and they contain the essential justification of her own work – ‘. . . I am not fleeing reality; I aim to enlarge it’. One hopes that she will lose neither her force nor her delicate power of fantasy, but develop them further.

1966 (394)