I simply responded to the poetry which I felt already existed in the landscape and the people of Southland (Curved Horizon 111).

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Having seen only a few of her poems, Brasch invites Dallas in 1948 to choose six for the proposed ‘under-thirty’ anthology. An initial enthusiasm is confirmed: ‘I think these poems will make a very good group, true and individual work’ (5 Aug). In deference to his editorial guidance, the opening couplet in ‘The Boy on the Rock’

  Returning, their laughter under the sound of stones
  The sea had rattled loosely as lightly as bones

becomes

  Returning, after the wind, and sea that had boomed 
  And roared among great rocks, their laughter seemed

‘This is what I needed’, she explains, ‘to have things pointed out’ (17 Sep 1949). Of ‘A Striped Shell’ Brasch cautions, ‘it might be wise to avoid words like “strange” and “mystery” when it’s strangeness and mystery you are trying to convey’. Continuing, ‘your admirable bareness and simplicity of statement, one of the chief strengths of your work, does now and then just verge on the trite and prosaic’ (12 Sep). Of ‘River-Paddocks’: ‘very good. Have I said before that you create a whole world of your own, a world one believes in and can inhabit?’ For the line ‘This would be the first day’, he suggests, ‘”This would be earth’s first day” or better “might be”… you have, to my ear, a great weight on the “a” sounds, possibly too much weight, which could be lessened by altering “banks of clay” to ”clay banks”…. Next stanza, comma after soil would help; “old Egyptian tombs” – “old” is trite, isn’t it? What about “once”? (17 June 1951). The middle stanzas as offered:

  This would be the first day if long boughs,
  Like the hanging roots in caves the river scours
  In banks of clay, had left the air unchanged. 
  Yet wind and light break up the willows’ shade.

  Trees there were that hid the sun till root
  And fallen leaf and branch, the very soil
  Seemed stained for ever black with their deep shade,
  Old trees that guarded bird-song and the bones
  Of fallen trees as jealously as old
  Egyptian tombs their jewels and dead kings.

July’s revisions (underlined):

  This might be earth’s first day if long thin boughs,
  Like the hanging roots in caves the river wears
  In clay and stone, had left the air unchanged. 
  Yet wind and light break up the willows’ shade.

  Trees there were that hid the sun till root
  And fallen leaf and branch, the very soil,
  Seemed strained for ever black with their deep shade,
  Old trees that guarded bird-song and the bones
  Of fallen trees as jealously as once
  Egyptian tombs their jewels and dead kings.

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The change from forest to farmland was so complete that it was not only difficult for later generations to imagine the features of the original landscape, but old people, when they returned to districts that they had known intimately in their youth, found themselves disorientated (110).

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Attraction to an Eastern aesthetic starts at seventeen when Dallas wins a world anthology as Senior Literary Prize (Southland Times). ‘I had read nothing of Charlotte Mew’s except anthology pieces’, she later explains, ‘they had the detachment that I admire so much in poetry, a kind of warmth through coldness – or perhaps coldness through warmth’ (15 April 1953). Come October and still recuperating from an operation of the previous year, she writes that she is working on a new sequence (‘The Turning Wheel’). This time she defends the reinclusion – resisted by Brasch – of stanza 3 in what becomes ‘Headlands in Summer’:

  Limpet-firm the root that tied
  Powder of seed in spray of storm,
  Holding the ripening flower from harm,
  Sweetening crevice and cliff-side.

She says: ‘You asked, does it add anything? Yes, I think it adds, if nothing else, “ripening” – the grass-flower is not idly flowering, it is (in spite of its stormy position, and because it has been able to adjust itself to its environment) ripening’ (19 March 1954).

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‘Letter to a Chinese Poet’ is sent in its entirety (17 sections) in 1956. Following an invitation to make a selection for publication, sections 1-7 appear with minimal revision the following March. Sections 8-17 undergo more extensive discussion and alteration. Some insight is gained into the poet’s working method when we compare the manuscript version of ‘8. Autumn Wind’ and The Turning Wheel 1961 version (excisions are crossed through):

   But [W]ords would not have come to write to you
   If I had not seen into your heart
   As into water,
   In a song you made in tenderness and pity
   And self reproach [W]hen a slave-girl ran away[,]
   Water lying over stones,
   Transparent,
   As where you bathed at the [t]emple of Wu-Chȇn,
   Or here, by any mountain[-]side.
   With always before you the image [Meditating on the 
   symbol] of the clear pool[,]
   How could your heart not become clear?

From the mid-1950s onward the poet develops a more conversational tone, though spare in sentiment and diction.

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[Through] the old Chinese poets… I found I did not have to conform to anyone else’s ideas about poetry; but simply to write as I wished to write, to trust my own perceptions and to take my imagery and symbolism from my immediate environment.… In contrast to European thought, they saw themselves as occupying only one facet of the myriad-faceted natural world, not as central figures. (121).

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It seemed natural to me to choose ‘The Turning Wheel’ as title for a sequence of seven poems I wrote in 1953, since I had passed through a difficult period in my life, troubled by illness and a further experience of near-blindness from a new cause, and by the illnesses and misfortunes of others (122).

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It seemed to me at the time and still seems to me that simply by being alive we are walking on a dangerous surface (re: Walking on the Snow 170).

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We seldom saw snow in Invercargill, but most winters in Dunedin brought a light snowfall and spring was made more evident by the abundance of plum and cherry blossom, peach, hawthorn and broom…. Southland’s dark evergreen shelter-belts, plains and open windy skies were to be seen no more; dense coastal native bush remained only in memory; but that Southland’s poetic landscape still haunted me is shown in this poem from ‘Letter to a Chinese Poet’ (No. 12, CP p.46) which I wrote while lying awake one night in Crown Street (126).

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The return of the sun each day has always seemed to me, as to others, symbolic of a new beginning. I was now writing poems in which I

was not so often finding my imagery in the outer world as the inner world, and in which I was trying to eliminate barriers in the mind and between the senses so that I could think with more freedom. The ‘Jackinabox’ sequence (CP p. 173) is an interior journey, a restatement of a theme that occurs throughout my work, the ups and downs of experience, recovery after loss, mastery over confusion, another sunrise after the dark of night…. I once owned a Jack-in-a-box toy, a clown who, no matter how often I imprisoned him in his box, sprang up again at the first opportunity…. Like most people I had become more aware of the earth’s position in space as knowledge of the universe expanded, with the curved horizon that is visible from so many of our New Zealand beaches never failing to remind me that we are travellers in space as well as in time (re: Steps of the Sun 176-78).

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Dallas’s poetry doesn’t look or sound the way we expect poems to do nowadays. It employs predictable conventions: regular stanzas; unexciting rhymes and a lulling musicality (similes repetitions alliteration assonance abound); the subject matter is regional, prizing the ‘elemental’; tone is unemphatic, almost credulous. Themes are the ground of forever: resilience in suffering, dignity facing tumult. Yet by a curious turn in the logic of my own reading, I have come to see these as means to the poems’ strengths. The best in Dallas is exactly this strange turning upon the limits of convention, prescriptiveness. Her allowing form to remain straightforward presses us to search elsewhere: convention provides the framing device that permits an exploration of form-in-flux – a creative receptivity proves her most ‘enduring’ quality. Dallas settles on non-assimilability, on a fraught impossible rootedness, necessitating a constantly defamiliarized residence. Take ‘Autumn Garden’ from Country Road (1953):

Autumn Garden

  The trees she loved are loosening their leaves,
  But not for sorrow will they let them fall;
  Younger leaves are stirring in the bough. 

  Now, when the world should pause, the bees behave
  As if these were the earliest flowers, beans 
  Swell and swing on the trellis, apples ripen. 

  Nothing in the garden looks for her, 
  The summer flowers are scattering their seed, 
  The heavy apples dream of other trees.

Here (often ‘here’ or ‘now’ mark a snapped-off present) is an autumnal poem that is not a dirge of passing. Instead of imminent partings, of decay, the bees buzzing in anticipation is emphatic.

‘Sorrow’ enables the speaker’s ‘love’, though nature teaches or warrants neither. Letting go has not just to do with mourning; it is inbuilt in replenishment, resurgence (‘Younger leaves’). Loss suggests ‘the world should pause’; yet the bees will have none of it: they see and relish only abundance. That is why nothing in the garden ‘looks for her’. She may look askance, out of desire, out of ignorance. That reveals only her own predilection. Other seeing requires opening to passing’s company, the rotundness of ‘heavy apples’ arising not out of need or a nothing but out of an innate senseless fecundity. They are fully pregnant with it. And this the speaker’s awareness must stumble into. Intentionality hollows out, thwarted, it appears in reverse like a photographic negative.

   ‘Grandmother and Child’, ‘River-Paddocks’ and ‘Boy on Rocks’ reveal similar negations. In the first and last mentioned the intimacy portrayed occurs almost despite the surroundings: the ‘quiet old lady’ is likened to the ‘sea-sound’ of trees, to wind in leaves, to a tide-immersed rock, to a ‘large and cool’ rock, again to a ‘strong’ rock. The final stanza answers to some extent the riddling comparisons. It is the child’s credulity that reaches out for security amidst failing anchorage:

  As the rock remains in the sea, deep down and   strong, 
  The rock-like strength of the lady beneath the   trees 
  Remains in the mind of the child, more real than death, 
  To challenge the child's strength in the hour of fear.

The twist is that in the grandmother’s rectitude the child, seeking comfort, finds summoned a letting go of holds, beyond easy reassurance.

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‘Letter to a Chinese Poet’ is a tribute to Tang poet Po Chü-I and a key contribution to New Zealand poetic thinking. Understated and disarming, it provides a counter-narrative to the ‘South Island’ and national mythmaking prevalent at the time:

  Water in the house as from a spring, 
  Hot, if you wish, or cold, anything 
  For the comfort of the flesh, 
  In my country. Fragment 
  Of new skin at the edge of the world's ulcer. 
                             (‘4. Clouds on the Sea’)

Distance and time collapse, ‘awayness’ proves nearby and not offputting or foreign – a jolt to the Curnow et al insistence that reality be local and special!

  I am reproached by the pine,
  And the dancing wheat-field,
  And you reproach me,
  Shackled with I and mine
  More heavily than you were.
                              (‘14. Ananda’)[3]

Attention fixes elsewhere. Not toward England and its empiric peregrinations, now an encounter with Asian Buddhism fills the mindscape. Local welcomes afar, just as the still new land had welcomed her forbears:

  I write this at the year's end, 
  A century from my fathers' landing…
  Cloud lingers on the bare hills.
  The chrysanthemums that blossomed in 
  your garden 
  Bloom now in mine.
  Tomorrow - who knows where? 
                                 (’16. The Year’s End’)

Uncertainty permits reality, reality permits displacement: ‘Abroad on a short journey / … Travelling… / a hard ball spinning / Indifferently through light and dark’ (‘17. Beating the Drum’).

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In her late volumes Walking on the Snow and Steps of the Sun Dallas again shifts ground. Interest returns to the perplexities of the human situated in externalities: where is deep sense to be found if not anywhere? Two late poems that tellingly capture this perplexity are ’Silver’ and ‘Japonica in Rain’, creating an oddly alien earthliness. There is a characteristic sparseness, pristine imagery, a terseness of form that undercuts simple residence in either an outside or an inside, instead inhabiting a pervious border between them. ‘Silver’ etches a pear tree, winter-bare:

   The pear-tree is frozen,
   Its antlers in velvet.
   Fear stiffens branches.

   In the ice of daybreak 
   It calls with the voice 
   Of a hollow-stemmed wine-glass. 

Deprivation and plenitude, mere bipolarities:

  Joy is
  Pain is
  In a two-sided pear-tree

In the end – is there an end? – ends don’t meet or justify anything.

  The monarch's head at once
  With the coin's reverse, 
  All barriers down.

The same still cascade of surplus feeling occurs in ‘Japonica in Rain’:

   Rain is falling and falling,
   Water cascades from the eaves.
   Clouds cover Mount Cargill. 

   The Japonica outside my window, 
   Where sometimes a grey warbler sings, 
   Is closed like a fair-booth in rain.

   They are gone, the children's windmills,
   Red and yellow, white and blue, 
   That twirled on thin sticks in the sun.

   The Japonica sings when the bird sings; 
   Falls silent when the bird is silent. 
   Tears are shining on its leaves.

The repetition of ‘falling’ suggests sadness, steadied by the observation of what’s outside the window: Mount Cargill. Despite the solidity absence and emptiness prevail – the warbler has disappeared and the tree closes in on itself ‘like a fair-booth in rain’. The simile is unexpected, a promise of enjoyment deprived. All gone. Even the (remembered) children’s windmills, in their ‘twirling’ colours, all gone (forlorn ‘sun’): only ever there precariously (‘thin sticks’). But the hollowness empties and fills: rain falls. The japonica (the earth, life, a shared reality) is tenuously present and what occurs is sound then silence then sound, ad infinitum. In the moment, if briefly, destitution settles: ‘Tears are shining on its leaves’. A rare use of metaphor: elucidation unnecessary.

In like fashion, showing a composure that permits what is, another poem ‘Overcast’ maps a similarly weathered melancholy:

  Long waves rise up in walls
  And topple, knowing all is hopeless; 
  They will never overcome the shore, 
  Where the pines lie wind-racked…

  Hours pass, and the planet turns idly 
  As a child's ball spinning on a wave. 

Without companion, ruminative, the speaker turns about her own depths. Expansive objects are embraced, endorsed: turbulence in skies seas clouds (‘clouded’). The heavy ‘rise’ and ‘toppl[ing]’ fall of waves is ordained, unstoppable, against the shore they attack again and again – without avail. Whence the effort? Tatty pines onshore are ‘wind-racked’ – unduly set upon by the same wind that topples solid, massed ‘walls’ of waves.

The final image literally breath-takes. This poet of similes finds a superb simile which anchors a mental state, reducing the entirety of what it means to exist in the ‘idle’ rotation of the planet. She pinches the reader into dumb-faced acknowledgement, combining the innocence of the child’s ball (‘windmills… twirling’?) abandoned and ‘spinning’ as purposelessly, on the same mass of water. So tender, so dire, such – Dallas tells us – is our predicament.