envoy

envoy (auckland: puriri press: 1996)

Alan takes considerable care to clarify the rubric. On the title page he lists the various dictionary meanings of ‘envoy’, and he ends by explaining in the final poem that these are ‘dedications; signs of debt, allegiance, argument, and confession’. It’s a rubric of some solemnity, but as the reading progresses we see it is also much more than this.

This is the book of Alan’s measured utterances over the memory of those now dead who have somehow affected or moved him deeply. They form a rather unlikely bunch, some known personally to the poet and some not, most unnamed; included are historical and contemporary figures, obscure and famous, Aotearoan and not, male and female (mostly male), writers and non-writers. In my initial reading I have found that it is not that simple a matter to identify the individuals, or even to be confident that each poem represents a specific individual. I’m sure I miss much, although I do recognise a number of quite significant literary quotations that are worked into the texts, and some people, including Ursula Bethell, John Cage, a friend ‘George’, William Dunbar (where the piece is made up of glossary entries to the medieval makar’s poems: or so I learn from Alan), and Alan’s own father. Suffice it to say that the relationships are affective rather than descriptive; the process of identity has been taken beyond a mere naming of names.

And as much as any supposed obscurity reflects my own inability to unpick the traces (as does the fact that much relates to what we term strictly private experience and thereby remains virtually untraceable without Alan’s own biographical information), I nonetheless find that the accomplished texturing of phrase and reference cajoles rather than disturbs. Beyond the near liturgical formality of these ‘invocations’, it strikes me that Alan is being quite cheeky and playful.

This playfulness is beautifully offset by the formal measure and constraint of the poems. The lines move one to the next, boustrophedon-like, with the not-to-be-waylaid steadfastness of the ‘ox-ploughing left to right, right / to left, letters overlapping in sound, in soil’. More than a series of discrete posthumous tributes, Alan’s voice keeps washing up against itself, thickening, dropping off as it picks up, kept full as much with the moving and manner of itself as with the details of the person who serves as the ostensive subject, addressed typically as ‘you’. There is an absolute regularity of formal composition. Each line is made up of eight words, each poem of 13 lines (‘our baker’s dozen’), the start and end of which fall equidistant from the centre of the line; there are 25 poems in total (one human generation’s worth; or two baker’s dozens or an alphabet’s worth less one). The pieces seem not to formally open or close (no caps, no stops), as one might have expected had they been written as formal portraits or dramatic depictions, which clearly they are not. We seem rather to find ourselves carried from one piece to the next, the voice not closing off or shifting but carrying through in the same way that two voices talking together are distinct yet share the same space. It is as if the very constraint of the form used intensifies the sense that the poems won’t be held in, what’s in them is like an emanation, everywhere filtering out through the lines that simultaneously lose nothing of their rigour. As mentioned, each composition incorporates something of the person the memory of whom matters to Alan: in the case of Bethell, the piece revolves round the very delicate balance of her own ‘fugitive, I am very fugitive’ and the contrasting, immensely solid word ‘established’. Cage is represented in a piece in which the first letters of successive words in each line spell out j-o-h-n-c-a-g-e: ‘Journey on, happy noticer; cracked a generation’s ear’).

The relationships are alternately open or closed, sometimes both at once. Take the piece addressed to Alan’s ‘father’:

again the river, twenty years later. Bush, forts,
fantasy, without clear love of Nature, but tracks
well worn to the stony bedded water. Then
I stood on the edge of the carpark where the 
bush was cleared, and wept. Now it’s time 
to be done with you, father,
river, birthplace, childhood, out. Will I repeat 
you for ever, or just rehash that tone’s discordant 
note again. The text, then, by way of
what array enlarges, so that crossing the lagoon 
the mirrored gull tips wing to wing no
part of any unremembered pleasure, or tranquil restoration
of things past. Each day dawns once only

The places and activities of childhood are captivatingly evoked. Yet there’s a bittersweet quality, suggesting the memories are emotionally troubling. There is the drag, the supplemental ‘after’, that stops anything from the past from wholly residing there. ‘Without clear love of Nature’: in the carpark, in our past and current situations, Nature is not always natural. So with the father. Throughout childhood an unquestioned presence, now in the son’s middle years ‘it’s time to be done with you, father’. Though that ‘done’ means especially that – as unquestioned. The father’s presence becomes a questionable (‘will I repeat you for ever’); the feelings are mixed, fraught, intimacy grasps the hand of rejection. Even the oblique late allusions to Proust and Wordsworth suggest that in literature as in life separating and gathering are ever in want of each other.

So this is an endearing solemnity, excusing neither the playfulness with the seriousness nor the seriousness with the playfulness. The real tribute is Alan’s showing by his skill and care his evenness in the contest with those with whom he challenges himself. In this way, too, it is a tribute to himself, to his own ‘persistent, long engagement’.

More than commemorations of individuals whether obscure or not, these are outgivings and intakings, advances and returns, by which nothing is lost to either. Happening to be reading early Levinas on Heidegger, I am inclined to see Envoy in terms of that same enquiry. Alan’s becomes an asking into individuality and separateness, into an existence that self-defines by its very conditions (impinged on by others and other-ness) and as such is not abstractable beyond the kinds of engagements that occur. These are addresses to those who will not hear or consider, at least not with the benefit reserved for Alan the speaker or the over-hearing us. As as if inadvertent colloquies they challenge us to participate in the constitution of an individuality that is held deliberately open.

As with Heidegger, this amounts to more than a matter of heightened consciousness. Distance, detachment, are finally between people only figurative. We are involved in a defining (always unresolved) that is so only in the process of its occurring. Heidegger terms this ‘dereliction’, and it does carry the sense of negation and passivity suggested by that term. At risk of veering away too far, let me draw in two brief quotations (again Levinas on Heidegger, 1932):

For the peculiarity of Dasein [being right-there]... consists in existing in such a way that its quiddity is at the same time its way of being; its essence coincides with its existence and Dasein does not understand itself in its true personality but in terms of the object it handles: it is what it does, it understands itself in virtue of the social role it professes.

Thus Alan can say ‘I am now the father I wanted my father to be’. And I guess we can add, and the Ursula Bethell he wants to be, and the John Cage, and the George, and so on. In this sense the love that is important and ultimately freeing is the love that means that one incorporates others. One draws breath, as it were, in terms of the other, we are in common: back and forth, boustrophedon.

The recognition given in Envoy is bedded in a skilfulness, in places mutual, in the making that is poiesis. While in this brief review I have wanted to indicate as best I can Alan’s skill and his rectitude, this is something I am hardly able to do adequately.^[1] These are poems he has written, dexterous, unerring and eerily beautiful, among his best as they are among the best of their kind in Aotearoa. It’s like quoting Alan to Alan, but here goes:

he utters an old Greek coin. The rite
springs upon him, not to cogitate, but to 
perform, poetics as the art of work yet
to be done, resisting, on a resistant order.
What will the past give you. Is kinship 
that your psalms will blurt these tears only
at that chronologically secondary manifestation of any act 
of discovery. All these disunited fragments will both 
bombard you and slip away, the stock unhampered play abandoning the stock felt phrase. No doubt
the sharp intake will register the breath, 
variously, and ‘where the spirit wills’. Bite on it. 
The gift of chance is all around you

I have been fortunate enough to have worked from a pre-publication version of the text. It intensifies the public intimacy that reading is to witness. Another point I should note is that the text has been carefully illustrated by Mark Wills, Alan’s son — ‘the father I wanted my father to be’. This brings me to a final point that I don’t think I’ve mentioned, and that is the tenderness suggested by such collaboration that also shows everywhere in these poems.

note

[1]  The review appears in A Brief Description of the Whole World 6, (July 1997), pp. 52-55.