Tuesday Poem: Wild

For Colin


erupting from a flock of birds
arms wide open
that great heart pumping
so hard so hard


that great heart pumping
so hard



Mary McCallum



A poem about my friend Colin Webster-Watson, a sculptor, whose great heart gave out nearly five years ago. He'd feed the gulls every day down on the beach near my place, and oh they knew he was coming! What a noise - what a sight. His arms would be flung out like the wings of the birds that flocked to him. But then he was always like that, arms flung wide ready to embrace.

Do check out a powerful sensuous arresting poem on the Tuesday Poem hub this week by Bill Nelson.  It will stay with you I promise.

Tuesday Poem: Through a Dream by Colin Webster-Watson

          for Jean

May I rest between your thighs
And dream of outer space,
While I travel through the themes
Of thought and mind and grace.
For ours is a world gone by,
Though we tethered its hinterlands
As clouds rushed by with force.
Longingly we look back
At what we could have sought.

                                          1992


From Natural Zoo: poems, word-plays, performance pieces and other perorations (Steele Roberts 2011) by sculptor Colin Webster Watson (1926-2007), edited by Colin's niece Anne Manchester and myself. Available at Rona Gallery, Eastbourne and Unity Books,  or email: ronagallery@paradise.net.nz or info@steeleroberts.co.nz.  Copyright: Colin WW. Here is my introduction to his work.... 

Singing poems into the world 


It was Colin. On the phone. He’d just written a poem, and wanted to read it to me. Anyone who knows Colin knows I had no choice in the matter, whether he was ringing from the other side of the world or, as in my case, across the road. So I sat down and listened as his voice delivering that poem down the phone -- a voice as deep and strong as a spring tide. I swear if I’d hung up on him, I’d still have heard it filling up the gardens of Pukatea Street.

That’s the first thing people have to understand about Colin’s poetry – him, his voice. He was first and foremost, ahead of sculpting even, a performer. His poems were him. There are hundreds of them – beautiful, thoughtful, playful, provocative, silly, sad, sensual – and all, I believe, were written with performance in mind. He performed them down the phone, at dinner parties, on a garden stage, as part of a show he called ‘Pohewa’.

The sheer volume of them, and the exuberant way they tumbled into the world, means the reader can stumble over infelicitous phrases, over-wrought lines, inconsistencies in punctuation, and rhyme that can verge on doggerel. To get to the heart of Colin’s poems is to think of all this as flotsam, his voice, the tide. He was one of those poets who sang his poems into the world, and the voice of this generous, ebullient, loving man is the companion at your elbow as you read this collection.

As with any flotsam, there are treasures beyond those things that catch the eye. There is the light the poems throw on Colin’s life as a friend, lover, family member, citizen and artist; and there are the insights into the human condition and a particular life well lived, that stop you for a moment, and make you read again.

Colin also delights with his natural sense of rhythm and rhyme, his love of word-play and sounds, and the use of a direct conversational style that comes straight from his theatre days. Check out the repetition in ‘A thought to think’, the humour of ‘My Appian Way’, the opening gambit of ‘For Jane’ and the opulence of ‘On the train to Sperlonga’. And how about a lyric line like ‘A fluctuating day’, or the wry ‘As the world turns/Even so the pot’?

I believe Colin’s best poetry is when he has written simply and honestly, as he does in ‘Through a dream’: ‘May I rest between your thighs and dream of outer space’. His confidence to write this way clearly grew over the years, and the more antique expressions that he delighted in as a younger man slipped away. In their direct meditations on life, these later poems show more of Colin the philosopher than the performer.

One of his last poems, ‘Salute to the great possum hunters of Eastbourne’ surely rests itself on the shoulders of the first poems ever: the salute to the hunter, rendering him heroic. True to this style, Colin plays with language, alliteration, and rhythm – elevating both the language and the men – and at the same time making something all its own. 

Anne and I have worked on Colin’s poems on and off for a couple of years. For some of those meetings, local writer and friend Penny Walker joined us. We’d take turns to read aloud from the huge spiral-bound manuscripts, and later, we spent time editing for consistency and sense, and to shore up those poems where Colin had, shall we say, burst his banks. We puzzled, we laughed, we felt cried, we had fun. And we’ve drawn together a collection that we believe is a fair reflection of the best of Colin’s oeuvre – enhanced by his drawings and photographs.

Anne's indomitable energy and devotion to her uncle have driven this project. I have enjoyed our evenings working on the poems, and by ‘our’ evenings, I include Colin of course. Reading his poems has allowed me to get to know him better, and I hope the same goes for the other readers who pick this volume up.

_________

Colin was a sculptor of international reputation who was born and brought up in Palmerston North, but lived much of his life overseas in the UK, Italy and the US. He returned to NZ in his final years - becoming my neighbour and friend.

As well as sculpting, Colin wrote hundreds and hundreds of poems - Natural Zoo is a selection of the best of these, along with some of his drawings and photographs, and was launched this month at Rona Gallery here in Eastbourne.

The launch was a theatrical affair - just as Colin would have wanted it - with readings by local actors and writers including Anne and myself, with the appearance of a local possum hunter adding spice to Colin's poem: Salute to the great possum hunters of Eastbourne.

Colin was one of those people who enhanced the lives of everyone he knew. He was 'larger than life', warm, encouraging, funny, theatrical, and a creative force to be reckoned with. My first Tuesday Poem 'Missed' is about Colin, and our mutual friend writer Maggie Rainey-Smith has posted a tribute to Colin and his book.

Please seek out more Tuesday Poems - at the hub this week is wonderful NZ poet Dinah Hawken, and you'll find another 30 poets in the world of the sidebar.

Taste of sea spray

Thanks to Nicola Smith & Bruce Rennie of The Press for this review - the first for The Blue.




Taste of Sea Spray by Nicola Smith
Review of The Blue by Mary McCallum [Penguin 2007]
The Press, July 28, 2007

Any novel that opens a window on a previously unimagined time and place is hard to put down and New Zealander Mary NcCallum's impressive debut novel, The Blue, achieves this spectacularly.

McCallum's voice is strong and beautifully honed from the first page of this fascinating story of the inter-war world of the small whaling community at Arapawa Island in the Tory Channel, where the wounds of World War 1 are still fresh while the unsuspected horrors of World War 2 loom ominously closer.

The Blue is Lilian Prideaux's story. A war bride and seemingly quintessential New Zealand woman of her era, Lilian is vigorous, hard working and resilient.

But the facade of commonality crumbles all too easily when the return of her troubled son creates fissures in the taut inter-relationships of the islanders.

McCallum captures the smallness of Lilian's world to perfection in prose that is vibrant with life, and deftly juxtaposes her mundane daily existence with the electrifying seasonal slaughter of whales which is the life-blood of the small community.

Like war whaling was men's work in 1938 and yet both powerfully shape Lilian's life; and McCallum's representation of both the trenches and the hunt are unflinching.

Barbaric and enthralling, the three-month whaling season galvanises the entire community, and McCallum skilfully avoids straying into moralist, while starkly revealing how much New Zealand has changed in so short a time.

Moving seamlessly between past and present McCallum gradually reveals the unseen fractures in Lilian's life through the characters of her children, husband and the island community.

The freshness of her prose is remarkable, with descriptions so vivid you can almost taste the salt spray and smell the pine needles underfoot. Her portrayal of the 1930s man is particularly subtle and insightful.

The Blue offers a fascinating insight into a past era and a lost way of life. McCallum's deft and skilful handling of her story produces an original, polished first novel and the promise of a second that will be well worth waiting for.

Review Ends

There's nothing like a first review of a book for an author. The week The Blue was released into the shops last July, my friend Penny rang me from Christchurch to say The Press had a review (yes, the same Penny who rang me to tell me about the Montana shortlisting). She read it over the phone and we both danced for joy.

It was by Nicola Smith and I decided to run it in full on the blog today because there's no obvious web link I can use and it's a nice counterpoint to The Montana excitement - the excitement of the single reader at home with the book.

When I emailed to get Nicola's permission to run the review, she told me she'd only just had a baby when she read The Blue. She said, 'I enjoyed your book so much it distracted me from staring at my new baby for several hours.'A new baby!

I know two people for whom The Blue was the last book they ever read. My dear friend Colin who died aged 83 and my friend Valerie's cousin.Colin didn't finish it. He died peacefully with one more chapter to go. And so the book became one of the bookends of his long and colourful life, like seeing his last seagull, patting his dog for the last time, going to his last play. Who knows which book was his first? It would have been read to him, no doubt, by his elegant mother Zillah who wore long buttoned gloves even in the country. A fairytale, I think.

Anyway, it's nice to know The Blue has been read at both ends of the spectrum. Even if the baby didn't exactly read it, she (he?) couldn't have been closer. (Actually come to think of it, this baby must be nearly one by now, walking perhaps, certainly enjoying books.)

The other serendipitous thing about this perfect first review is that it came out in the South Island which is the home of The Blue.

Photo: Me at Rona Gallery - where I work and The Blue was launched - the week it was released into the shops.