The Ikons

by James K Baxter

Hard, heavy, slow, dark, or so I find them, the hands of Te Whaea teaching me to die. Some lightness will come later when the heart has lost its unjust hope for special treatment. Today I go with a bucket over the paddocks of young grass, so delicate like fronds of maidenhair, looking for mushrooms. I find twelve of them, most of them little, and some eaten by maggots, but theyll do to add to the soup. Its a long time now since the great ikons fell down, God, Mary, home, sex, poetry, whatever one uses as a bridge to cross the river that only has one beach, and even ones name is a way of saying This gap inside a coat the darkness I call God, the darkness I call Te Whaea, how can they translate the blue calm evening sky that a plane tunnels through

like a little wasp, or the bucket in my hand, into something else? I go on looking for mushrooms in the field, and the fist of longing punches my heart, until it is too dark to see.

JAMES K BAXTER Selected Poems (edited with an introduction by Paul Millar)

Carcanet 14.95
James K Baxter once had a readership well beyond his native New Zealand. His early books were published by Oxford University Press; journals like the London Magazine regularly carried individual poems; some contemporaries read him closely. I have heard writers as different as Charles Causley and Galway Kinnell say that they hoped one day to edit a selected Baxter for British or American consumption. But such projects dissolved or drifted away. More recent champions have been Stephen Burt (who teaches Baxters work at Harvard alongside that of Basil Bunting and Derek Walcott) and Michael

Schmidt who, through Carcanet, is the publisher of this newSelected Poems. So maybe this book will change everything. Still, it has to be said that Baxters reputation remains essentially local. He is, as they say, world famous in New Zealand. Wh en he died of a heart attack in 1972, Baxter was only forty-six, and his celebrity so considerable that newspaper billboards proclaimed the loss. If anything, awareness of him (arising as much from his social and spiritual activism as from his poetry) has increased in New Zealand over the years. An academic conference on his work a while ago was titled James K Baxter: Poet and Prophet. The prophet thing is no joke. People regularly visit his grave in the remote Maori settlement of Jerusalem / Hiruharama on the banks of the Whanganui River. Some of them go more or less as pilgrims. I have made the trip myself. Baxter like Lowell, whom he read avidly in the 1960s, having first got over a bad dose of Dylan Thomas was one of those poets who shifted the grounds of social conversation. He lifted a particular subject matter into his poetry (partly through the visible drama of his life), so leading public discourse into quite new territory. Part of this had to do with his oppositional temperament. He was happy to point to the Emperors lack of clothes, or to borrow his own metaphor to act as the sore thumb of the tribe. Most importantly, he anticipated Pakeha (i.e. European) New Zealand in his commitment to all things Maori. At the end of his life he had established a sort of commune or tribe in Hiruharama, and was advocating that Maori spiritual values might join with Christian ones to redeem the nations ills. (An important book about the impact of Baxters social experiment has recently been published by Victoria University Press: John Newtons The

Double Rainbow: James K Baxter, Ngati Hau and the Jerusalem Commune.) Of course, to middle New Zealand,
Baxter had simply become a hairy, smelly, barefoot hippie thus confirming a whole set of standard prejudices, including those about the general uselessness of poets. He had even renamed himself Hemi the Maori transliteration of James or Jimmy. His independent vision and sense of social responsibility must have come originally from his remarkable parents. His mother Millicent was New Zealand born and Cambridge educated (her father had been a founding professor at the University of Canterbury), and very much a non-conformist. His father Archibald was a farm worker who had become a conscientious objector during the first world war. Archy was sent the twelve thousand miles to Europe, publicly crucified (i.e. bound, ha nds, knees and feet, to a post for hours at a time), and even taken to the frontline trenches. Archy and Millicents moral courage and independence were inherited by their son. They gave him a solid place to stand one usually at odds, as he himself remarked, with the status quo and maybe, by example, they also prompted in much of his early work its uninterruptible confidence. Baxter always thought big. What happens is either meaningless to me, or else it is mythology, he once wrote, and a kind of Yeatsian self-mythologising was present through all the passages of his life and work. His early alcoholism, his conversion to Roman Catholicism, his move to Hiruharama these were just the most extravagant markers of a man who lived out his life on a public stage. His talent in verse was remarkable from the first. He began as a precocious, extraordinarily gifted poet looking for a voice and determined to try his hand at everything. In 1954 he observed that we need all kinds of verse, polite and impolite, religious elegy, epithalamium and drinking song and sometimes it seemed that he was determined to supply New Zealand with them all himself. The poems of his last years show an increased, if looser, richness. His experience now uttered itself in meditative prose, in unrhymed, couplet-driven sonnets, in rhyming verse letters, in ballads and sestinas Baxter is one of the unsung masters of the sestina in poems that sound like prayers. The remark Yeats once made about how we make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry has always seemed pertinent to Baxter. His early poems adopt the first position the quarrel with the world. They are full of high, vatic pronouncements, and usually end with resonant certainties. Here is the last stanza of one of them, a poem about a childhood raid on a hive of wild bees:

Fallen then the city of instinctive wisdom. Tragedy is written distinct and small: A hive burned on a cool night in summer. But loss is a precious stone to me, a nectar Distilled in time, preaching the truth of winter To the fallen heart that does not cease to fall. (Wild Bees) There is no conversation to be had with such a voice. It makes the word preaching alliterate with the word precious. It i s seamless in its utterance. You listen, or you leave the room. Fortunately (it seems to me) the later Baxter takes up Yeatss second kind of quarrelling. It is partly that he begins to wri te many more poems in the form of letters, so that there is no longer that sense of a wise man intoning to an empty hall. And now he makes the contradictions of his life available to his poems. In the later poems particularly in the Jerusalem Sonnets the inner quarrels provide the subject matter as well as the modus operandiof the whole enterprise. The old rhetorical gestures are replaced by the intimacies of a voice that seeks truth yet knows how provisional every step along the way must be, a voice that is happy formally with a casual vernacular freedom. The Ikons, a short stand-alone poem illustrates this tone. Te Whaea, by the way, means mother although Baxter is thinking of the Virgin Mary: Hard, heavy, slow, dark, Or so I find them, the hands of Te Whaea Teaching me to die. Some lightness will come later When the heart has lost its unjust hope For special treatment. Today I go with a bucket Over the paddocks of young grass, So delicate like fronds of maidenhair, Looking for mushrooms. I find twelve of them, Most of them little, and some eaten by maggots, But theyll do to add to the soup. Its a long time now Since the great ikons fell down, God, Mary, home, sex, poetry, Whatever one uses as a bridge To cross the river that only has one beach, And even ones name is a way of saying This gap inside a coat the darkness I call God, The darkness I call Te Whaea, how can they translate The blue calm evening sky that a plane tunnels through Like a little wasp, or the bucket in my hand, Into something else? I go on looking For mushrooms in the field, and the fist of longing Punches my heart, until it is too dark to see. The key works, the Jerusalem Sonnets and Autumn Testament long, meandering, paratactic sonnet sequences have something of this flavour. The Jerusalem Sonnets are written from (and about) Jersualem / Hiruharama, and are addressed to Baxters friend Colin Durning. They are like a set of spiritual exercises, and part of their aim is to record the poets attempt to make himself worthy of his ambitious desire to found a commune for outcast young people. In other words, the project they record is an elevated one. Yet the sequence is also full of quotidian chit-chat, moments of contingency, false humility and comic surprise as Baxter enjoys, as much as he deplores, the incompatibilities of aspiration and circumstance. And when, in sonnet thirty-nine, he runs out of things to write to his friend about, the poems are over, too: . . . I had hoped for fifty sonnets, But here are thirty-nine, my gift to you, Colin,

From Hiruharama, From Hemi te tutua. The sonnets last two lines are just a postal address and a signature; they require one small preposition in English, and four words in Maori. James K Baxter is now Hemi te tutua Jim the nobody. Like many prolific and protean poets, Baxter looks his best in a firm selection, and in this respect Paul Millar has done a valuable job. He makes strong choices, yet gathers in the full reach of Baxters work, including some fine ballads and polemi cal work. I cant think of any significant poem that is missing. (Well, maybe Haast Pass.) It is especially good that room has been found for the full sequence of the Jerusalem Sonnets. Millar has ordered his selection, persuasively, into four decade-based movements the Forties, Fifties and Sixties, and a last section called The Jerusalem Period and his introduction offers an exemplary overview of Baxter. The Maori Glossary will be helpful to many readers inside as well as outside New Zealand, but I wish Millar had been able to give more than the five useful pages of notes included here. For example, I am sure non-New Zealand readers would find it helpful to know that the letters RSA are short for the Returned Services Association and not, say, the Royal and Sun Alliance insurance company. And maybe its my own liking for gossip, but I suspect readers would also be pleased to know that the last, untitled poem in the book was probably written, by the then itinerant Baxter, on the wall of a friends house just six days before his death. This is a fine book, a wonderful place to start for those who dont know Baxters work. Now perhaps someone will do the same service for other poets who are still world famous in New Zealand. The one to turn to next might be Hone Tuwhare.

THE IKONS
February 3, 2010 by luckyal Hard, heavy, slow, dark Or so I find them, the hands of Te Whaea Teaching me to die. Some lightness will come later When the heart has lost its unjust hope For special treatment. Today I go with a bucket Over the paddocks of young grass So delicate like the fronds of maidenhair, Looking for mushrooms. I find twelve of them, Most of them little, and some eaten by maggots, But theyll do to add to the soup. Its a long time now Since the great ikons fell down, God, Mary, home, sex, poetry, Whatever one uses as a bridge To cross the river that only has one beach, And even ones name is a way of saying This gap inside a coat the darkness I call God, The darkness I call Te Whaea, how can they translate The blue calm evening sky that a plane tunnels through Like a wasp, or the bucket in my hand, Into something else? I go on looking

For mushrooms in the field, and the fist of longing Punches my heart, until it is too dark to see.