Tome poems
Decades of verse by Denys Trussell fill a big book with lines that cry out to be spoken.
Ahandsome hardback volume of nearly 800 pages, By Sea Mouths Speaking comprises the collected poems and related prose of Denys Trussell. It gathers together 45 years of the poet’s writing from 1973 to 2018, more or less in order of publication, but with short poems presented before long poems. Noted as both an environmentalist and a biographer (particularly of ARD Fairburn), Trussell has displayed in his poetry, over nearly half a century, both a consistent worldview and a consistent style.
Even his most discursive sequences of poems are always vers libre in short terse lines, which sit on the page like slim columns. They are structured primarily for the voice, not the eye, each short line having the quality of a breath. Often compared to musical scores, some of Trussell’s poetry has, understandably, been set to music by New Zealand composers.
As for the poet’s worldview, it is most clearly articulated in his “Essay on Poetics”, included in this collection. Trussell has what can only be called a Dionysian view of humanity and nature. He regards the best poetry as being a celebration of our part in nature and as being erotic in the most general sense. We respond to nature sensuously. In the process, Trussell perhaps underrates other forms of poetry, but he has admirable loyalty to his vision.
His approach can be stimulating, as in the long cycle Walking into the Millennium, with its reflections on the Kaipara and Hokianga harbours and its querying of human dominion over nature. Equally absorbing is his earlier cycle, Archipelago: The Ocean Soliloquies, which attempts to encompass the effect of early explorations on the Pacific. The ecological note is sounded most clearly in Song and Antiphony in Greenhouse Weather, where there is “carbon dioxide bursting/from motor exhausts/of the citizen cars/” and an imagined paradise is violated.
There are some problems with this massive text. In his long explanatory endnotes, Trussell tends to be Gertrude Stein’s “village explainer” telling us the bleeding obvious at length. More difficult, in his love poems, whether it is Trussell’s intention or not, women tend to become things, dissolved into his anthropomorphic view of the natural world. Typical is
Of Woman Light, where “to the woman/of my love/I would say, it is/possible to equate you/with light”. It is a relief to read The Poem of the Familiarities, which presents a real woman in a real domestic situation before it heads off into lofty metaphysical generalities.
These are small faults in a major achievement, however, and easily forgiven when we come to a resonant sequence such as Speaking to the Islands of the Ancestors. Here, Trussell considers thoughtfully the many distant cultures that Pākehā New Zealanders have absorbed and in the process makes a significant statement about our collective identity.
It is possible that Trussell’s poems are too allusive, too abstract and simply too long to gain him the New Zealand readership and iconic status of Allen Curnow, James K Baxter and a few others. Even so, they are important reflections on what this country is and where it came from. BY SEA MOUTHS SPEAKING, by Denys Trussell (Brick Row Publishers, $75)