another loss

And so Hone Tuwhare has also passed away. Damn, he was by far my favourite New Zealand poet. Well, no, just plain one of my favourites. He was a boiler maker by trade with not terribly much in the way of formal education, but he was a natural poet who could speak directly to the soul.

He published the first book of poetry by a Maori writer in English, No Ordinary Sun, in 1964. Here is what I think is one of the most powerful poems from that book:

Mauri

Ere gods were shaped

to polished images of brass

and fired clay

the meek stone hardened

to a consciousness its own.

 

From its soul’s core sun

to another sun responded:

succoured the lonely man

his tribe’s invention of trees

sweeping the sky’s floor clean

 

When gods were fused

to an angered one

all-seeing triple-faced

still

did this man’s tribe store

reverence for the stone

from whence plants sprang

sweet water leapt:

 

and jeaolous of its well-spring

destroyed utterly

the new god’s sour

and honeyed strength

turning alas

the meek stone’s joy

to a cloud

to an ashen face.

(taken from the 1998 re-edition of 1964’s No Ordinary Sun)

I guess one thing that shows clearly the era in which No Ordinary Sun was published and just how new it was to have a Maori poet publishing in English for a general, and not specifically Maori, audience, is that even in the 1998 re-edition, Mauri comes with a footnote explaining:

Mauri is a material symbol of the hidden principle protecting vitality. Life principle, talisman, thymos of man. (Denotative meaning taken from Dictionary of Maori Language by Rev. Hoani Laughton.)

I once saw Hone Tuwhare at a poetry reading in Dunedin back in my Scarfie days: Imagine that poem read by the rambling, surly voice of a burly boiler-maker who still looked like he’d feel more comfortable in the railyards than surrounded by young intellectual types in a cafe.

Such a sad January for Aotearoa. A New Year of giants falling and legends passing into weak memory.