In retrospect, it’s great
And a collection of Marshall’s poetry has a fitting visual accompaniment.
Ahandsome and capacious hardback, complete with ribbon bookmark and illustrated with many landscape photographs by
artist Grahame Sydney, View from the South is clearly a deluxe piece of book production. But it is much more than this.
Acclaimed short-story writer and novelist Owen Marshall has so far produced three collections of poetry. View from the South is his personal selection of what is best from this work, but it adds some previously unpublished poems.
At the very least, this is a great retrospective.
The South Island is Marshall’s chosen heartland, and his imagery is of large
uninhabited spaces, clouds over mountains, mallards and paradise ducks and old stone walls. There’s a strain of nostalgia for pioneering days in some poems, and others look back to the certainties of childhood and the yearnings of adolescence. But most often it’s the wisdom of age, the mellowness of enjoying small everyday things, and a soul accepting the fact that life is finite. In other words, these are poems of healthy maturity.
Marshall enjoys some traditional forms. Sometimes he does rhyming couplets
and he produces a sequence of haiku. Occasionally, too, his diction belongs to an older tradition of poetry. What is most typical of his work, however, is the apparently straightforward description, which is barbed with meaning. There is powerful resonance to the physical things he presents, which makes him like our version of Robert Frost.
An excellent strain of observational satire, too. His poems “Book Launch” and “The Slam-Dunk Poet” should be required reading for every aspiring author or puband-cafe poet.