John Newton

John Newton (b. 1959) grew up on a sheep farm at the top of the South Island.  He has a Masters degree from Canterbury and a PhD from Melbourne, and taught in the English Department at Canterbury from 1995-2009.  His books of poetry are Tales from the Angler’s Eldorado (Untold, 1985), Lives of the Poets (VUP, 2010) and Family Songbook (VUP, 2013).  He has also published The Double Rainbow: James K. Baxter, Ngāti Hau and the Jerusalem Commune (VUP, 2009).  He now lives on Waiheke Island, near Auckland.  He is married to public health activist Robyn Toomath.

Lunch

Shorn in this weather the sheep get burnt

so they’re trapped in clusters,

piled in the shade.

They’ll wait for dipping until they get

patched up, comb-furrows

rust brown, mending black, and troubled with lice still

they work their backs

against the rutted trunk of the big macrocarpa.

Twelve o’clock.

When the shearing machines and the tractor

go off it seems silent

at first: then you pick up the sound of a chain

being wrapped around a fuel-drum kennel,

the thump of surf,

the blare of cicadas, the squeal

of hinges on a gate swinging open.

Or you do if you listen.  And the high

square door of the woolshed frames

the breathless glare outside

in shade, a vehicle closing in down the hillside

trailing its balloon of dust.

The powerlines catch the sun like water.

Packed in the shade of the big macrocarpa

this morning’s shorn sheep heal

and rock in the heat.

Ferret trap

A white hen sitting under the house

butchered, the nest cleaned out.

With a ferret about

the nights are full of noises.

They may show up in possum traps

but you’re never ready, you never get

used to the noise they make when you

corner them, the smell, the coldness

of the fur to touch,

the body like a cat’s surprisingly

heavy.  The blood

on bait or the plate of a trap

seems darker than it ought to be,

darker than possum blood,

darker than the blood of a hen.

The dogs bark at a pair of headlights

creeping down across the black hill,

the chooks in the macrocarpa shift with unease

as you staple the trap to a wooden pile

and set it, sheep’s heart jammed on a nail

for bait.  You wash up, watch T.V.

and wait for the smash and the cold shrill chatter

an arm’s length away from you

under the floor.

Opening the book

You open the book

and there unfolds a road          its skin is blue, it is summer

the heat          that dances in its hollows turns

into water.  You ride it in the vehicles of strangers:

homesteads and haybarns          dusty yellow sheeptrucks

convoy of soldiers in jungle greens returning

from an exercise

slipping past their polarised windscreens;

you draw from them splinters          of lives made of words

though you never take your eyes off the mountains.

The mountains          reach out to embrace you

they fold their blue ankles

they give birth to rivers, they

can even crouch like tigers if that’s the way you

want them:          they are a story you tell

about yourself, a story you are journeying

into, that swallows you.          You leave

the road, then          you honour the logic of ridges

and gorges, of funnels, of slotted

stone chimneys          You startle a huge bird

nesting in the riverbed, climbing on slow

cream and ash coloured wings          and you follow

as it disappears

inland, you tunnel to the spine of the island

and bury yourself          alive, with your possessions, this

curved sky, this whisper of ice-cloud

this magic mountain shutting  behind you.

I grew up at place called Robin Hood Bay in the Marlborough Sounds where my parents farmed.  My earliest poems were self-consciously regional – memories of the Sounds, or of other landscapes in Marlborough and North Canterbury – and as concrete and imagistic as I could make them.  ‘Lunch’ and ‘Ferret Trap’ are from Tales from the Angler’s Eldorado.  ‘Opening the Book’ was written a couple of years later.

from ‘Lives of the Poets’

7

This evening’s guest speaker needs no introduction

and the boy and his missus no second invitation

to observe at the shrine of their weather-beaten elders,

their proud expeditions, their indomitable ascents.

Every other Tuesday being Young Folks’ Night,

upstairs at the Sensibility Club.

‘My comrade in arms, the late Stokely Adamant’ –

the Feral Professor tamps his pipe – 

‘I can picture him now in the faculty tearoom

terrorizing the dear old Leavisites,

conjuring his divine afflatus

with a Zippo lighter and a coffee spoon.

There were no creative writing schools in those days,

you mark my words!

Talk about years in the wilderness, Gentlemen:

he taught himself to touch-type in Japanese, his first time in Long Bay!’

Far off somewhere in the blue smoky distance

the Zip water-heater blows its lonesome whistle

but the twinkling scholar has found his theme and refreshments are suspended

in the anecdotal amber of his eloquence.

The poet’s on a drilling rig in Azerbaijhan,

now he’s in a boatshed on the Hawkesbury River

with the green mosquitoes and the hookfaced ibis,

the red raw skin of their underwings like terrible trackmarks,

and his diet is gin and jimson weed

and the sunsets spread like burning oil

while he works on his difficult Blood Sugar Sutras

and picks off the fruit bats at dusk with his trusty Armalite.

Hank and Shona feel dizzy themselves

as they pick their way home through Darlinghurst,

he in his buckskins, she in her summer dress.

‘It’s a lot to live up to,’ he says.

10

Shona’s night off – bugs in a rug,

with the phone uncradled and the vodka chilled

and the constellations of tea-lights mustered

and a thunderstorm tearing apart overhead

and reggae (‘slowly, from the hips’)

and the renovating virtue of hot knives and tinfoil –

a hippie sportin’ lady on a busman’s holiday

and Hank Fortune Jnr, irrepressibly tuneful.

(Perhaps we should tip-toe from the picture,

close the door quietly and leave them together

building their play-house of pizza cartons,

designing the high-ceilinged rooms of the future?)

Outside tyres make waves in the street.

A branch wipes big splashy hands on the glass.

Headlights sweep the blistered paint

with the glycerine wash of an incipient nostalgia.

He sings:

Shona, where can I write you, lover,

crossing the desert on your hands and knees?

You made me feel like a grown man, lover,

in the last November of the 1970s.

Clair de Lune

After a hard day behind the wheel

out there somewhere in the lunar hinterland

new-car sickness of the company wagon

with its boot-load of samples or swatches or whatever it is you’re ‘travelling in’

and evening finds you Christ-knows-where

in this little desolate service town . . .

So here’s the question (What’s it to be?)

either:

(a) the publican and his wife

her motherly chat and his Fish of the Day

a beer or two with the mild local farmers

a cavernous bathtub, a ‘home-cooked’ breakfast;

or: (b) a cinderblock motel

a ‘studio’ at off-peak rates,

stroll through the chilly lavender dusk to the single phonebox

to call your wife

while the insects fizz in the baleful sodium

aureoles of the Hopper streetlights;

TV perched at the foot of the bed

TV dinner from the Superette

middling red in an acralyte coffee mug:

‘glass half-full’, is that the expression?

Like doleful music, like a storm at sea: this

heartbreaking world that has so many ways to be happy in it.

from ‘Stations’

The Assassination of Kenneth Koch

At old St Mark’s, in the bowels of the Bowery, he reads from his

mighty poem for peace, wherein are contained, by his own estimation, 

all the Pleasures of Peace that there could possibly be.

He jiggles about behind the lectern, he waves his briar insouciantly,

the idea of peace is really catching on

until, with a flourish of car horns, the doors burst open to grant admission

to the scuzziest hippies in the Northern Hemisphere.

‘Tear down the Terrible Institute,’ shouts Ben Morea.  ‘Death

to irony!’ Listeners squeal at the gun’s report

and Leroi Jones flutters down from the balcony. 

The poet, God be praised, is safe: ‘Oh grow up,’ he says,

donnishly, ‘you have the wrong man, I am a lyric poet

from Cincinnatti, the child of Keats.  Why, the city is teeming

with calculating and unhappy poets.  Shoot one of those!’

Kerouac, somewhere near Billings, Montana

Beneath the outline of his face, in the smoky window

of the Greyhound bus, the atavistic continent,

its pitch-black mountains, its steel-grey rivers,

scrolls by him.  Knight of the Dolorous Countenance.

Here is the West of his mislaid connections: neighbourhood

softball games under floodlights, a girl in bright denims

with strawberry hair, a fatherly face among the wind-beaten ranchers

at the card tables back in some beer joint in Butte.

In every valley there’s a single light, and every light

is a family’s love, and the inky night between them expands

in his chest.  With his hand in his trousers

he cradles himself, adrift in the darkness and solitary joy

of an epic grief that could almost be real, that

could almost be something else, minor, too painful to touch.

Electrical storm (Joni Mitchell in Winnipeg)

The first crash of thunder overhead empties the room.

That’s how it is on the prairies, the weather comes first.

Even the bar staff abandon their posts: by the time

she gets through the second chorus she’s playing to the furniture.

The emptiness sucks the breath out of her lungs.  She remembers

the Emerson respirator, the night nurse who slapped her

for baring her legs while she bargained with God to let her walk again. 

Every age (who was it said this?) admits one complaint.

A few days ago she heard ‘Positively 4^th Street’ on a motel

transistor, and it blew her world open.

She could do that!  It left her calling into continental space.

But that was him, and this is her, and the year is 1965:

she strums to the number’s end, lays down her instrument,

follows the audience outside to take in the show.

The senior year of high school hypothesis

Granted, it’s not the most elegant phrase, or indigenous

either, but that didn’t matter, reading Lowell and Eliot

and drinking Robitussin on the dormitory roof.

‘Preludes’, Prufrock, the quatrain poems, all that gorgeous

early stuff, and you knew that there was a person there,

a dandyish, unhappy person with an accurate grudge.

What else could ever compete with that: two young men, at such an

absolute age, happening on ‘My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow’?

Back home, of course, it was a different story, in the wreckage

of some awful family dinner, bashful, belligerent,

fingers and thumbs, as you tried to find the thread

of all that fevered becoming, and the Old Man, finally,

condescendingly pouring himself two fingers of gin

and reciting Milton’s sonnet on his blindness.

My first book appeared when I was 25, my second, Lives of the Poets, when I was 50.  People often ask me why I stopped writing, to which I usually reply that if I knew the answer it wouldn’t have happened.  But the question has been an ongoing subtext in the work I have published since.  The title poem, which I describe as a ‘novella’, is about a young man’s mis-education.  As always, the problem is Romanticism.  The fourteen sonnets of STATIONS evoke moments of excitement or perplexity among a rogues’ gallery of romantic avatars.  Like much of what I write, they vacillate between lyricism and satire.

from ‘Great Days in New Zealand Painting’

4

Meanwhile, back in the scenic zone

(Boyd Webb’s bathtub, von Guérard’s altarpiece)

Sigrid and Günther, saddle-sore Romantics,

tipple on a lukewarm Lucozade, easing

their hamstrings.  All day into a moderate

headwind, grinding up into the throat of Southland,

but the lake edge here is a wave-lapped mosaic,

reds and ochres, olives and blues. 

Now, as at only the most perfect places,

the lovers build their ephemeral shrine:

cradle of fallen, rain-softened branches;

platform of moss and old man’s beard;

then snail shells, pebbles, paradise duck feathers,

beech leaves (amber and scarlet) that find their

own way. 

And look, now:

here comes a worshipper!

In ten-gallon hat and psychedelic lederhosen,

whistling a tune of his own composition,

it’s JR – angler extraordinaire –

descending to the water to commit to

sky-burial the four pound slab his exquisite

skills lately conjured from the

water hazard at the Glenorchy golf course.

A sensitive soul could have nightmares here:

these strutting black-backs, their reptile

gaze, the flush on that muscular bill

like a congenital bloodstain.  But our

fröliche campers, pumping the primus,

dispose their tender thoughts elsewhere,

while the lake water dimples

and the athletic taste-maker packs his

evacuated trophy with a flourish of wild mint.

from ‘Small Farmers’

7

Something was always not right with other

people’s farms: landlocked, bleak, deciduous,

it feels as if it was always winter.

The pond at that place in the hills behind

Sheffield, late on a Sunday afternoon,

I can only imagine it choked with

ice, in a cage of leafless poplars, grey,

like oatmeal.  Ice, too, veining the muddy

path from the tennis court to the winter

garden (the oddness of it, but yes, of

course!) where bark was a kind of inverted

blossom, the golden willows lit up with

amber heat.  And now I can never smell

wintersweet without being back on that

frozen farm: my schoolmates carving across

the surface, belting a stone with their field-

hockey sticks, while I, who could no more skate

than ski, lost in a gigantic homespun

jersey, gripped the frame of a kitchen chair

as I inched my way out on to the ice.

from ‘Driving to Erewhon’

2

DARFIELD     WEST COAST   

MT SOMERS     GERALDINE

Night-time strips out the scenery but leaves

you these places.  History descends like

a plague of rabbits, shaving your story

back to the root, but out of the dark the

names come rushing, and burn themselves into

your retinas, dip-stripped and luminous.

A lifetime ago there was poetry

here: it glowed like the frail white coral of

a kerosene lamp.  History would have

it otherwise, but your lights find its sans

serif aura, still faintly vibrating. 

A lifetime ago there was poetry

here – you could walk across the river on

its back.  But history arrives with its

hands on fire, like Butler, sweetening the

country for sheep.

                                   Legend has it there was

poetry here.  It smelled like high-summer

heat in the manuka.  Sometimes the rain

drove it into the forest where it crouched

in the blue shelter of its pipe.  Sometimes

its hold on the air was so light it seemed

to stall above the trees.  History falls

from the sky like a payload of poisoned

carrots in the summer grass. 

                                              Once upon

a time there was poetry here.  It clung

to the hairs on your legs in the bush.  It drank

and roared and discharged its weapons and fell

face down in the silage pit. 

                                            History

spreads like a plague of filmmakers, story-

boarding their fascist hokum. 

                                                History

turns like an iron mangle, grinding you into

sausage meat, and then feeds you back

to yourself on a stick while poetry

gestures hysterically,

                                    No, don’t eat it!

Somewhere out in the dark beyond Mayfield

a young man rides to the gate for the mail

and a hare lies still in the long grass as

if to let him stroke it.  And the little

fishes leap in his lap, and the gape-mouthed

harrier speaks his name: Cresswell, bard of

Robin Hood Bay, finest poet in the

language ‘since Tennyson’.  Would you look

at those mountains! the great man exclaims – the

Arrowsmiths, their immaculate teeth – and

he vows to take a stonemason and climb

the proudest peak in the range where he’ll carve

his poems in a font so bold you can

read them all the way from his brother’s farm.

Family Songbook is a meditation on the ways in which landscape imprints itself on us: landscape as family romance.  ‘Great Days in New Zealand Painting’ is a mock history of South Island landscape painting.  Eugene von Guérard (1811-1901): colonial painter;  Boyd Webb (b. 1947): distinguished contemporary photographer;  Sigrid and Günther: fictional German tourists;  JR: prominent Christchurch art dealer.  ‘Small Farmers’ is a boarding school narrative set in Christchurch and North Canterbury.  ‘Driving to Erewhon’ describes a night-time drive up the Rangitata River and into the Canterbury high country.  The sheep station known as Erewhon is the initial setting of Samuel Butler’s famous novel; it also furnished locations for the Lord of the Rings movies.  D’Arcy Cresswell (1896-1960), whose family farmed briefly in the Rangitata, is widely believed to be the silliest New Zealand poet of all time.  By a curious coincidence, he was educated as a small boy at a tiny private preparatory school at Robin Hood Bay.  I imagine him here as my idiot doppelgänger.