Celebrating The Positive

Deep Down Things: Collected Poems, by Amy Brooke; Medlar Press (Nelson, New Zealand), 2008, 206 pages, NZ$24.95.

Visiting Christchurch in New Zealand recently, I was shown over Rutherford’s rooms in the old university and mentioned Douglas Stewart’s great poem “Rutherford” to my hosts. None had heard of Stewart, who left New Zealand to pursue a literary career in Australia in 1938 at the age of twenty-five but who continued to write often on New Zealand. Indeed I mentioned Stewart to several well-educated people in New Zealand—poets even—and drew a blank almost every time. It struck me as sad that two such culturally close countries should not share the best of their poetic and other cultural heritages.

It is hardly to be expected that poetry rooted in a “sense of place” will always travel well, but good poetry in the English language on universal themes should be accessible beyond its own shores. One contemporary New Zealand poet whose work would appeal to many Australians—and can be read with great profit as well as pleasure—is Amy Brooke, a prominent journalist and children’s author. Deep Down Things is a selection of her work from over four decades. Apparently simple (which means accessible) it is in fact the product of a passionate intelligence and a deeply effective though unobtrusive mastery of technique.

Many of these poems remind me of those of the West Australian poet Andrew Lansdown. They are concerned with the apparently mundane but in fact transcendent values of every life. The title of Deep Down Things is apt indeed. The book’s tone is tender, yet tough-minded, intelligent, perceptive. “Christmas” describes a mother’s weariness, washing dishes in a sink, but gradually turns to joy at the contemplation of her children. “First Day of School” is piercing:

But today, when yesterday’s child

Held my hand so tightly

Then trustingly let go, braver than I …

In describing the pains of male–female relationships Amy Brooke plainly has no truck with feminist hysteria or gender identity politics. One series of poems on this theme puts the male state of mind, and the crushing weight of “gender obligations” with as much perception as it does the female:

Every day I have to heave

Myself out of the house to face

The importunities of people

Of whom I am so weary.

Words don’t come readily,

Less so, even, to a tired mind.

How to tell you how betrayed,

Cheated, I feel, watching the years

Steal you away from me, days

Dividing us always …

… Exhaustion

Is not a light-hearted bedfellow.

Oh stay with me, and share at least

Our dream time.

This is one of those collections, many of whose poems seem slight in themselves, but which gradually create a cumulative effect, and a distinctive one. To me, the major feeling which arises from the collection is a celebration of courage, compassion and goodness in normal life.

There is a delightful selection of poems on animals (mainly cats), “Friends from Other Dimensions”, and a series of much angrier works about abortion, “Songs for the Unborn Children”:

I had a friend

The other day I saw her

Pushing forty

And a small boy

With a face that smiled,

Eyes that trusted her.

They shared a secret,

as he said

I was waiting for you!

No one is waiting for me,

For I sang their song

I am a woman.

I have a right to my own body,

And I turned my back

On my baby’s right to hers.

This poetry is not fashionable—on the contrary, it is positive and life-affirming, or at least does not fear to express fury at the deniers of life. In his excellent book The Loss of Virtue, David Martin has written:

We are so afraid of dismissive and knowing gestures and ironic insinuation that we do not

admit anyone is admirable or steadfast or generous. The very words make us recoil defensively … this backing away from the exemplary may prove a costly cowardice. Because worth and integrity are embodied in people more than they are conveyed in ideas, and any good society needs publicly to recognize goodness.

Amy Brooke’s poetry does this. It also reminds one how little moral purpose, how little celebration of the positive, is to be found in contemporary poetry—which may also directly relate to how little it is read. I find myself quoting, of all unlikely people, Richard Neville, who wrote a few years ago:

In art, as in life, this is not the time for nihilism, sadism or spiritual defilement … as surely as toxic residues kill the fish and fowl, so the gangrenous sludge of a bastardised intelligentsia kills our spirits. It is renewal and valour that is needed now, honour and optimism, not the sordid excesses of lionised shlock-addicts.

He continued that we should be asking of our culture today:

Is it life-enhancing or life-degrading? Does it glorify what it pretends to condemn? Is it oriented towards a solution, or does it overly magnify and distort the problem, in order to thrill and titillate and to gild the bottom line? Is it defeatist, ignoble, sadistic, or is it empowering, illuminating, honourable?

These are questions to which Amy Brooke’s poetry gives the right answer. Nor is her work, if still unfashionable, exactly alone. In fact—a thought which first occurred to me when reviewing John Hyde’s book of poetry recently—something strange seems to be happening in poetry at present. Those who Mark O’Connor called “The Bubble” poets, and others the “generation of ’68”, who so long dominated the local poetic scene have, for all their grants, subsidies and politicking, indeed gone like a burst bubble, leaving hardly a trace, or a single memorable line, behind.

Perhaps we are getting back, after about three decades of suppression, to a poetry of meaning rather than of word-games and disconnected, de-constructed images. Deep Down Things includes some well-turned light verse, including a series of limericks on books (can one imagine anything like this emerging from the ’68ers?):

I want all the books I can see

Well, nearly all, just for me …

            I’ll save or I’ll borrow

            And am pleased that tomorrow

I’ve been promised a boxful for free …

It may well be to the likes of, and the artistic heirs and descendants of, these unfashionable poets that at least much of the future of poetry (if it has a future) belongs. We have here a book, whose words, often deeply moving, speak of things obviously worthwhile, obviously healthy. It is a breath of fresh air, and highly recommended.

Deep Down Things by Amy Brooke is obtainable from The Medlar Press, PO Box 139, Nelson, New Zealand.