Voices from the Suburbs

Peter Bland, an English immigrant, began his writing career in this country and has had verse published freely in local periodicals. He became the most vigorous of the New Zealand poets of the Fifties. The work in this book shows a broad humane grasp of the middle range of experience – happenings in the lives of the poet’s children, the pleasures and pains of marriage, the small incidents which strike a spark from the stone of daily monotony. It is preciselypage 702 a lively, robust charting of this middle area which verse in this country has most lacked. Mr Bland is a most accomplished poet. His tone of mixed gentleness and irony is very much his own. I think, however, that one of his chief assets may have come from the accident of immigration. When he looks back (as in the poem, ‘Mother’) to the stabilities of childhood and adolescence, a remembered England looks out from between the lines of the poem –

. . . Beside your grave
I danced to your favourite tango and lowered
Your sky-blue pyjamas from the steeple,
While all about me sailors and factory girls
Coupled beneath the trees . . .

Thus he has a double vision – two countries, two ways of life, seen in juxtaposition – and when he examines the characteristic rootlessness of New Zealand suburbia, the images have stereoscopic depth. His laconic style is deceptive. In fact his work possesses a formidable maturity.

The poems in Richard Packer’s first book fall broadly into two categories – personal and apocalyptic. That perfectly constructed poem, ‘No Way Out’, is representative of the first kind –

Bubs, bongo drums and wine
sauced my adrenal youth
through parks and upstairs flats
in crooked Wellington.
Not these nor books could raise
the slightest smoke of truth . . .

Though admirable in its vigour ‘The Night after Wormwood’, a colloquy between the last man on earth and his guardian archetype, is the kind of poem one has often hoped for and almost never found. There are one or two poems where an extreme compression of metaphors leads to an opaque density, but they should open out in a degree to the many readings they deserve. Mr Packer’s hard, violent poems express most powerfully the tensions and despairs below the moral surfaces of an affluent society. I have rarely been more invigorated or compelled to greater respect by the work of a New Zealand poet.

1965 (338)