Kwamra: A Season of Harvest, and: Captain Cook in the Underworld (review)

These two notable collections share an engagement with issues that concern the relevance of poetry to Pacific histories, cultures, memories, and traditions. Careful reading suggests a close-focused approach to specific cultural and personal concerns, in addition to the fanfare of occasional themes. The appearance of Russell Soaba's collection is a significant event; it takes as its title theme Kwamra, the dry summer season in savannah regions, "a season of harvest," as the subtitle states. Robert Sullivan's poem, written as the libretto for the fiftieth anniversary of Wellington's Orpheus choir, was performed by the choir and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in composer John Psathas's oratorio Orpheus in Rarohenga, in November 2002 at Wellington Town Hall.

Formally and stylistically these are very different works. Soaba's free verse foregrounds Anuki modes of aesthetic representation, such as akoa ("new" knowledge; wisdom, truth) and maiba (the common form of Anuki communication that expresses truths through parables and riddles). In its confident combination of English, Pidgin, and Anuki references, the collection is a model of what readers can increasingly look forward to in Pacific poetry. The introduction is a clear and considered declaration of artistic independence: "What we are really doing for the first time is attempting to best express ourselves in our own language through a certain medium of human communication known as the English language. We are no longer merely borrowing the language. Rather, we are transcending both in order to find ourselves actually living the pulse and beat of our languages within the flesh of the English language itself" (ix). Each poem carries the cultural harvest of the poet's social experience, exploring existentially and experimentally form, language, and point of view.

The opening poem, "Return of St Nativeson," refers to Soaba's influential novel Wanpis (1977)—the title word translated here as "(i) one piece: one who professes self-hood, commitment and social responsibility in his style of living; (ii) an existentialist in Soaba's writings"(59)—which traces the development of artistic identity through a number of characters. Tension, too, is developed in this poetry collection around the conflict between lusman (a loser [58]; also an existentialist) and wanpis, in which artistic production requires a coherence and focus the lusman fails to achieve. Facing the possible meaninglessness of life as a writer entails risks and challenges. St James Nativeson (a name chosen by the character Jimmy Damebo in Wanpis to reflect the influence of James Baldwin) was a character who signified the difficulty of reconciling individual and communal concerns.This poem reflects succinctly on the relationship between poet and people; the poet's presence of mind is merged into time and place, "the afternoon bare with native anguish" (1). Responsibility to past and future is indicated through the awareness of followers or "disciples" who are the beneficiaries of the labors of the poets, who in turn must depend on those who come before andafter to carry on poetic traditions. The statement "The poet will come today" (1) becomes the site for a meditation on the irony that the role of the poet is often signified through doubt, absence, and cultural insecurity; the "nativeson" returns (or can he?) as one who must still juggle an outsider identity with the need to communicate with the multicultured working people of the nation, who each have their own relationship to feelings of inclusion and exclusion. Like Sufi sayings or Buddhist koans (problems for meditation) in the many-layered possibilities of their interpretation, the poems exemplify the poet's understanding and practice of maiba.

& he came in smiling like a nervous poet the result of all that he had thought & explained that he had left his passport somewhere "Prelude to the Third...