Poems for the Red Engine

by Gary McCormick

Published by Piano Publishing (1978)

For many of us the sudden, sharp wail of a siren is the only thing that can start us out of ourselves; on any Saturday night after closing time people will walk right past a violent scene outside the pub or at the taxi stand: you get used to it living in the city. Even riding the buses across town can get pretty weird sometimes, and the weirdness just becomes part of the environment after a lot of exposure to it.

But the sirens: most of us will always stop and turn to watch for the police car, ambulance or fire engine. Of the three the fire engine is the most exciting; possibly its on its way to a big blaze uptown: siren, tires screaming - even the safety colours on the sides of the engine are a scream, the expressionistic reds and oranges reading Beware! and Make Way! We're caught there on the street corner, craning to see the engine with its valiant crew.

As children we realise the danger and excitement of the fire engine, and we retain it as adults. It is this primitive alertness to danger and excitement which gives the fire engine its symbolic power. Street-poet fury McCormick has realised the simple worth of the fire engine as a symbol also for imaginative wonder and freedom, as well as riding it on a short-cut to the Human Condition.

This new collection of poems reveal McCormick's great strengths as a satirist and a lyric poet. Still in his twenties he is without peer in NZ where poets are published as frequently as false alarms to the local fire station, and often with as much skill as a new fireman trying to manage the shiny pole, two thigh gumboots, and an already exiting engine.

Poems for the Red Engine: the subject of these fire engine poems is often not fire engines but the illusions of romantic love, the sterility of modern life, male chauvinism and the oppression of women - themes which show a deep, compassionate concern for society. Like all good satirists McComick lays pathos on the cuts made by his satiric pen as a kind of balm: and the effect of pathos, this gentle caring, is created often by just one or two finely lyrical passages at the centre or end of the poem:

The widows and the single
men of middle age feel the wind blow
like glass against their skin.
That is love, they say ...

(Love And The Big Red Engine)

...although we may never see each other again,
your memory lives on; this night adds
another silken thread to the history of love

(The Spider)

Like the butcher in O'Sullivan's Butcher & Co the values and attitudes of the man under the fire outfit are examined. In these poems firemen are seen to be hypocrites, murderously calculating and corrupt. And they underline the violence, childishness and the injurious crassness of the NZ male.

Another poem, "For The Engines Will Be Coming" brings up to date Baxter's lovely poem about disillusionment, "The Bay":

The fire station stood never far
from the post office
and the post office from the sea
where we young boys spent most of our
young lives
digging caves in sandstone banks
and when the sea came up,
surfing the large waves.

... The fire station stands next
to the post office, and the post office to the sea,
and as often as the young boys
tried to ignore the sound of the siren,
it could not be ignored.
If they stacked their houses high
with children and madness,
still it would not go away;
for the engine will be coming
for those who lie awake
and the best houses will quiver
in the orange light.

In "Sunset & Hill, Sunset & Hills" McCormick comes closer to the pulse, the temperature of the city environment than he has come before in his poems:

I have just come from a small house across the city...
which a young woman calls home...
When I left, the husband was out on the road, shouting
for his wife to come out, while the brother sat sharpening,
polishing his knife & the main road was full of people
doing their shopping: more knives, more slaughter.
The street roared off at either end into a mixture of sunset & hills, sunset & hills.
Every five seconds, the automotive heart gave out
one more vomit of steel into the blue horizon
and you wonder why I will not leave the city.

The spooky black humor of "What The Fireman Said" and "The Killers In Our Town" is reminiscent of Peter Olds, while "White Crow" darkly warns us away from politicians and bureaucrats as Sam Hunt did in "Beware The Man."

Poets like Peter Olds will we hope continue to rail from the psychiatric ward; meanwhile McCormick stands on the outside, between the madness of modem life and the psychiatric clinic, giving us the lowdown on life.

The poet, the street-wise lover of women, is capable of looking on all this activity wryly. He sees that:

The engine
is only
one form of destruction
in search of another.

(Firemen)

He is drawn to the people who populate these enormous fire zones we live in, these friends, strangers and lovers driven crazy by violence and speed. Without losing himself in their press he writes for their salvation in these poems.

Poems for the Red Engine tells us about ourselves - our society and the way we relate to one another - more truthfully than all the poems published in the last five years in this country put together.

Brian King