Harvey McQueen RIP

The first book on my list of hammock reading over summer was This Piece of Earth (Awa Press) by Harvey McQueen - a fellow Tuesday Poet. I started it on Boxing Day, without knowing Harvey had died on Christmas Day, and finished it three days later drunk on its lovely words. This Piece of Earth is a memoir based around Harvey's passion for gardening and food with segues into his other passions: poetry and education.

It’s a book that above all else begs you to take the time to reconnect physically with the planet: listen to the song of the tui, appreciate the chutzpah of the self-sown seedling, observe the wings of the housefly, delight in the brief scent of the violet, share a bowl of green herb soup. It is written in a way that slows you down, calms you, makes you think again - as Harvey's wonderful blog stoatspring did for me on an almost daily basis.
Here's an extract from the May & June chapter of This Piece of Earth:

The tui whirrs daily. Often a pair of fantails fluster beneath him. As winter proceeds the garden looks increasingly forlorn and dilapidated, but the violets, red pineapple sage, polyanthus, alyssum and resident chrysanthemum try to keep a brave face on things. By early June the freesias and ranunculuses are up, and crocuses and daffodils are breaking through. The Lest We Forget rose has one deep-red bloom. I pick it and present it to Anne. She adds it to the vase of violets I gathered yesterday. (p.230)

A day after finishing the book, I heard Harvey had died. I was devastated. It seemed so incredibly strange, too, to have my head full to brimming with his voice and his words when he was no longer on this earth to say them. And yet, I guess … how it should be for a writer, how he would want it to be. The next day I planted my neglected tomato plants – higgledy-piggledy with an ad hoc sort of frame to grow up, but Harvey would say that didn’t matter, nor the fact of all the self-sown calendula flowers in the vegetable bed. The tomatoes are already putting out flowers and some fruit. Every time I water or weed them I think to myself: this is a Harvey moment. I know I’ll think the same the first time I slice one of my tomatoes on a plate and eat it with olive oil and bread and a glass of good wine.

Tuesday Poem has been very lucky to have had Harvey McQueen as a member and we will miss him. I will post a full tribute on Tuesday Poem this coming week January 11. Meanwhile check out the post that went up this week with links to the Last Post on Harvey's blog, and the tributes by Tuesday Poets in the sidebar.

Rest in Peace, Harvey.

Tuesday Poem: These I have Loved

Not one poem this week from me - a hundred of them. Here:

I went to the launch of These I Have Loved on Sunday. Harvey is a Tuesday Poet who blogs rather wonderfully here, but until Sunday I hadn't met him face to face. To be at the Karori launch was such a treat, not just because of the TP connection, but also because of Harvey's role in NZ poetry, which stretches back to the time when I was first properly engaging with NZ poems as a pupil at Wellington Girls College. 


Harvey was a teacher and school inspector back then who co-edited Ten Modern NZ Poets (1974) - I have just found my copy on the bookshelves and, yes, there it is (I knew it was there): Ruth Dallas' Milking Before Dawn which Harvey has chosen to open his latest collection. How many NZ schoolchildren have read the poem which begins like this?

In the drifting rain the cows in the yard are as black   

And wet and shiny as rocks in an ebbing tide 

But they smell of the soil, as leaves lying under trees 

Smell of the soil, damp and steaming, warm. 

                                                   from Milking at Dawn by Ruth Dallas

Harvey tells the story of how, as a teacher in the Waikato, he tried a number of poetry classics on his class of sharemilkers children, to no avail. So then he read them Milking Before Dawn and this is what happened:

I had hardly finished reading it when a little boy jumped up and said ‘That's just like it is, sir. People in the city don’t know what they’re missing.’ I'd hit a gusher. 

He then went on to edit the seminal 'Penguin Book of NZ Verse' (1985) with Ian Wedde, and the 'Penguin Book of Contemporary NZ Verse' (1989). Of the 1985 book, poet Wyston Curnow said in a lecture once: 

Anthologies of New Zealand poetry have over the last 50 years played a defining role in the critical understanding of our literature ..... Ian Wedde and Harvey McQueen's 'Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse' proposed a radical revision. One fifth of their material was Maori; they gave us our first bicultural canon. Equally important was their ability to pick out for the 1980s, a range of ambivalences and ambiguities, puzzles and problems, in the understanding of our literature and culture not identified by previous anthologists. 

At the launch - at a church hall where I used to hang out when I was still a schoolgirl -  Vincent O'Sullivan thanked Harvey warmly for his contribution to NZ poetry, and the younger writer Kate Camp did the same.  In her launch speech, Dame Fiona Kidman paid attention to the depth and breadth of Harvey's love for New Zealand poetry and the way he poured it into the book - an eclectic mix. 

There are several recent poems by newly emerging poets, and also many who spring from a group of their time, people who were seriously writing poetry in the 1960s and 1970s, a time where my own modest poetic history began. Vincent O’Sullivan, Lauris Edmond, Alistair Campbell, Louis Johnson, Sam Hunt, Elizabeth Smither, Rachel McAlpine, Tony Beyer, Bill Manhire, to name just a few. In many ways it’s a meeting of minds amongst friends. 

Vincent O’Sullivan said to me the other day, and I hope he’ll forgive me for quoting him, that this book is significant in the wide range, the broad and generous tone of this selection. I echo that, the selection doesn’t live by any rule book about what’s good and what’s not. Harvey has simply chosen what he wants without fear or favour. 

More of Fiona's speech here. And you know it is a good book this book - to look at (photo by Robert Suistead) and to read - not just the poems but the introductions at the start and before each section. Already I've poured over it thrilled to find old favourites, and captivated and surprised by the poems that are completely new to me. It's like reading one of my mother's well-thumbed anthologies for its comfortableness - Harvey mentioned one of them: 'Other Men's Flowers' by Lord Wavell as an inspiration. 


Suffering from a rare muscular degenerative disease, Harvey McQueen regards each new day as a bonus, and this book as his swan song. His publisher Roger Steele is not so sure about that, and neither were the sixty people gathered to welcome the book. The feeling seemed to be that if there was a blank page, Harvey would find a poem for it.      


I wish I had the time to include some more extracts from Harvey's collection, but maybe later. Except for these two lines for Harvey the poet gardener. 

              .... The great 

orchards of our lives. All those trees. All that fruit.

from Tornado by Jenny Bornholdt




Go here for more on how to buy the book. And click on the quill in my sidebar to take you to the Tuesday Poem hub and more Tuesday Poets. Amongst them will be Tim Jones and Saradha Koirala who were also at Harvey's launch. Another bonus! 

And the world comes tumbling down

Moving post on Canterbury after the quake by poet, Harvey McQueen, born and bred in Little River.

And his wife, Anne Else, has a useful graph which shows the aftershocks petering out...