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Details Below. *** *** Please follow the copyright guidelines in this file. *** Title: Deadly Pollen Author: Stephen Oliver Release date: March 1, 2004 [eBook #11522] Most recently updated: May 2, 2023 Language: English Credits: Stephen Oliver *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEADLY POLLEN *** Deadly Pollen by Stephen Oliver WORD RIOT PRESS (c) Stephen Oliver, 2003 Books by Stephen Oliver Henwise (1975) & Interviews (1978) Autumn Songs (1978) Letter To James K. Baxter (1980) Earthbound Mirrors (1984) Guardians, Not Angels (1993) Islands of Wilderness - A Romance (1996) Unmanned (1999) Election Year Blues (1999) Night of Warehouses: Poems 1978 - 2000 (2001) Deadly Pollen (2003) Ballads, Satire & Salt (2003) Recordings Earthbound Mirrors, a selection, Stephen Oliver, Ode Records Label, Auckland, (cassette) 1984 For more information on Stephen Oliver visit: http://people.smartchat.net.au/~sao/ Cover design: Pina Ricciu. Cover image: The Lithuanian Bison, engraving from J. von Brincken, 1828. Acknowledgements: Antipodes (USA), Biff’s Quarterly (USA), Brief (NZ), Catalyzer Journal (USA), Comet Magazine (San Francisco), JAAM (NZ), Poetry NZ/26 featured poet, San Francisco Salvo, Spreadhead (USA), Thylazine (Aust). An Actual Encounter With the Sun On / My Balcony At France Street: a parody on Frank O’Hara’s ‘A True Account Of Talking / To The Sun At Fire Island’ who in turn based his account on Mayakovsky’s more robust poem, ‘A Most Extraordinary Adventure’. POETS’ PALACE: a name given by the author to an old Kauri, weatherboard guest house in France Street (the upper story of which he occupied in the early ’80s) near the prostitute’s strip off K’rd, Auckland. Various ‘emerging’ poets & artists lived downstairs at intervals during this period. As the last of its kind in Newton Gully this 100 year old wooden building was finally demolished at the close of the decade. Deadly Pollen is published by Word Riot Press PO Box 414 Middletown, NJ 07748 USA http://www.wordriot.org/press ISBN 0-9728200-2-7 Typeset by Word Riot Press in Bembo Contents 1. ‘ZIONISM:’ 2. ‘You return to the stupa, yearly,’ 3. ‘The stones collected. Ground’ 4. ‘ “With digital, there is no past,” ’ 5. ‘How is it the floating island’ 6. ‘Mediocre raiders lie in wait.’ 7. ‘Time passes - that pressure in’ 8. ‘Hugely, our indifference squats -’ 9. ‘Circuit; right hand wise,’ 10. ‘If streets had cobblestones’ 11. ‘A Public Works draughtsman’ 12. ‘Pyrrha, your dewy hair,’ 13. ‘The flames above the wall,’ 14. ‘Once cradle of civilization -’ 15. ‘Forty thousand tons. Space’ 16. ‘A giallo antico moon framed’ 17. ‘‘The Breaking of Nations’ ’ 18. ‘‘A line is taking a full-stop’ 19. ‘Buildings off the crustal shelf,’ 20. ‘Generalization of Old World’ 21. ‘CEOs in castles cascade’ 22. ‘Footprints for satellites?’ 23. ‘Is recollection seeing anew,’ 24. ‘So. Earth’s most dramatic’ 25. ‘I wanted to reach my hand into’ 26. ‘ ‘Your breasts in the mirror,’ ’ 27. ‘Alcatraz not Minoan ruins.’ 28. ‘Do words bring to mind flat’ 29. ‘Serpent-backed bridge profiled:’ 30. ‘One quadrant of sky turns,’ 31. ‘Barrel of the sun, gun-wad,’ 32. ‘Rubbed off sky exposes an’ 33. ‘The day combustible as a’ 34. ‘Compression of bees,’ 35. ‘Scent makes the air visible,’ An Actual Encounter With The Sun On My Balcony At France Street Deadly Pollen ZIONISM: to carry forward the cultural gene - O bright-lit destiny of the chosen! The child’s bouncing ball lands in mud on the other side of the wire; footsteps are paradoxical in a minefield. His heart ticks fast as a metal detector, slowly, the yellow ball rolls to a stop. Proposition: to advance onto ancestral territory, or return into gentle, familial lands, a footfall journey backward. His eye shrinks the land to desert. * You return to the stupa, yearly, to seek your return. You wish to come back as forest deer but that deer is extinct. The stupa is a rock upon which your dreams founder, yearly, - you return that which you do not have. Meanwhile, in the West, under ragged skies and beneath a hundred spires no longer dreamt of - attendance comes tumbling down; each stone, unturned, in an emptied space within a space caved under. * The stones collected. Ground levelled and swept. The first cubicle erected with four windowed-walls, an open doorway. One man on a step looking out to sea. Civilization open for business. Soon, marble was made smooth and square. The Idea locked into permanence. Curiosity stimulated commerce; others came and conquered then went away. That first step never forgotten became a throne - history’s seat. * “With digital, there is no past,” says Jean-Luc Godard. Either way, the button is redundant. Voice-command is thought - the fear deep and futureless as history, desire to appease which remains featureless, not the disorganized weather it truly is, as much a part of the breathing stars as constancy of rock. The ‘Mr Whippy Man’ weaves Greensleeves in and out of suburbia; a caravan in search of a trade-route - via the village that never existed. * How is it the floating island detaches itself from horizon in dream - its first appearance, otherworldly, but of this world, a wheel loosened from the world’s ratchet, out of time, riding above it and inhabited by folk fixated upon a particular theorem-thought; elevated imponderables, whereby you access this island by door set underneath as you sail under? Islands, a dream of round towers! the sudden rush of water under hulls. * Mediocre raiders lie in wait. Teeth clack in sleep, dreams fraught with ambush. Orders intercepted, encrypted to the house style. The litterateur tracked back through his ISBN to no man’s land - the robotic verb activated, sent in under barbed metaphor strung out where trees once stood as camouflage. The voices from his hill-bunker a wind turbine. Accusations tumbled in the night. For months he heard soft hammering, mimicry; they failed. Could not beat back the weather on his chosen ground. * Time passes - that pressure in space again - return of the unoriginals tinkering with the power-box - such fine work - setting traps out for darkness. Time passes - talons curve and hook - how the mouth chokes with ash. Feet drag muffled under dungeons. Time passes - that pressure in space again - a new proclamation from Semiotic City - this custom built dome and aquarium light, pulsing: henceforth, no corners to hide around - no zone permitted for surprise to leap. * Hugely, our indifference squats - unleavened as fear, blood is contained within news footage. Archaeologists stop digging deserts because of landmines. Camels wait for sand dunes to drift into ridges - blue flags flutter back at Fort Apache on brave white trucks (what gets through is the scent of coffee). A footless boy hobbles past, bargain hunting, a life at odds & ends - smoke drifts over Manhattan, out across the Hudson river as from a Bedouin campfire. * Circuit; right hand wise, homage to the sun - as did ancient Celts, Scythians, too - host to the Milesians on their last leg to Ireland as the first Celts castaway - whose home precinct the Black Sea, the right hand to the centre; memoried in standing stone circles. Yet homage to a sun as walking pillar of fire, with hell for a coronet? The world’s breath and mystery end here, earth’s innards engorged - sprawled redly coast to coast. * If streets had cobblestones blood would flow in tatters - torn flags to a revolution lost. Streets smoothly ease to drains. The cut deep, and blood wakes from its blackness, crushed as berries in the runnels of a wagon, oozes its oil from the body’s casket - til flesh becomes porcelain, perfect surface for moon, ice, the glass-edged sky to play upon; in silences deep as birch in the bayoneting dark - and leaves finally resemble paper money piled up under the turbined lamplight. * A Public Works draughtsman spent thirty years designing the City Sewerage Reticulation System he eventually hoped to escape through - a masterpiece! A prairie dog would have been proud of it. Complex of accented runs, angles, drops, sluices, pumps, ditches, endless unbowed archways, treatment ponds breaking into sunlight - the architects of Athens would have been proud of it. Only on paper - not one trowel lifted! miles and miles and miles of it. * Pyrrha, your dewy hair, yellow, scented, doubly wreathed in Jasmine, fresh from the trellis this morning - your new lover yet to arrive, breathless. Your tantrums are as sea-storms, heart-wrecking for that unsuspecting voyager - maybe as survivor, I might warn him against your squally lust, he won’t find safe haven in your arms! This note is record enough - that I set down against your lubricous hold. See: Horace’s ‘Pyrrha’ ode. I,v. * The flames above the wall, private show for the Gods, the city burned three days, at night, smoke warmed the stars. Border forest shifted with shields - scritch-owl, a horse’s impatient breath - the hawk wheeled under a pennant moon. In the grey dawn men turned North. The druid notched these events onto trunks that lead to deeper wood - envisioned - silence, incantation; the God found within the stone. * Once cradle of civilization - now crucible, a sandstorm of tanks, a battery of rocket-launchers each one bright as a guiding star slams home to its birth place, sand sprites leap dervishly, limbs gad about, horses buckle back upon themselves - empty out like exhausted bellows. A beggar (in nameless rags) calls out in either prayer or curse to the desert night first refuge for saints; Cross and Crescent belch fire. * Forty thousand tons. Space dust, diamond and sapphire, snips of light, collect on earth yearly. Dust breaks bread on our too dusty planet; on our twice dusty planet; on our overly dusty planet made available to wind; dust breaks down glaciers. Broken deserts from sand storms deliver dinosaur dust, highways loosen tyre dust, your home a time capsule - our earth bent dustward forsworn to decay. * A giallo antico moon framed within cratered ruins. Country turned up at the edges like a dirty postcard. Poplars, broken spars of pine, cypress. Dusty plane trees rubbed raw by abrading tanks in the market square. Two ambulances shoved aside. Kabul. The Republic of Georgia’s snowy mountains [backdrop to some desolate soccer field]. A few lean men shouldering grenade launchers pass by and grin, heading for the glacire. * ‘The Breaking of Nations’ a horse cough, as history laments its own passing. What ghosts urge these riots? Memory is dead, flags and banners dissolve back into thoroughfares. The East is reliquary; bone splinter and shrapnel mixed in daily. What ghosts urge these riots? Barbarism looms in the triumph of immediacy, a final exit from the Garden of Eden, bombs bristling moments ago at cockcrow. * ‘A line is taking a full-stop for a walk,’ said Klee. A straight line is the supreme act of cruelty; is intent without reprieve, ambush and final judgement; Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end, (bullet-to-victim); the scroll of credits, a squadron of lines; the banding of speech, a geology of sound; the blade tilt of horizon that bloodies a sun; is gravity compressed and a disk flung wide, is flatness departing life to nothing - spear cast on a plain at sunset. * Buildings off the crustal shelf, drop shouldered - lean to, against the sky in crazy surrealist back drop, expressionist haze is shock amongst rubble and safety helmets spotted lamp-lit - an engine harvests an infant, luckily, dead pale but pained; dust cakes sudden caves by a broken 10th floor grounded, bedraggled beneath re-inforcing caged. Tectonic plates lock brake drums an instant on the Richter scale. Taiwan slips on the tooth of a cog. * Generalization of Old World caught in the plane’s sweep. Look up! sound makes memory after. Dragging loss is violence; O ye who suffer banishment, nourishment grounded. Dearth ’tis. Rabble is ordinary, a thing apart, the jackal at play, toying with world’s diamonds, spittle aglitter. Laughter strewn, down-compressed to mud. From whence the swing and arc, blood’s roar rose, gave judder to the first step - before the word, the wind in the word; rabble speech was. In the beginning. * CEOs in castles cascade in cash, silent as a cyber virus - the invisible hides cause-and-effect, stock taken, bartered in Japan - via Belarus every back yard where falls a city’s shadow looming over the last, dead chimney pot, not even moon can empty its chamber pot of yellow, silver slops into alleyways crackling with plastic syringes, used condoms, blood trails, slewed off into a wilderness of free ways, high rise. O the dead arise in elevators nightly as Pharisees burst into the Temple. * Footprints for satellites? An old game. The Mayas knew it; land forms camouflaged, star charts, airy bestiaries, eagle, lama, beastback mountain sides, white pebbled Milky Way, an ancestral footbridge. Look down or up, backwards or forwards. Weirdly, rotating our options, weighing odds; caught in bristling cyberspace or a stone corbelled chamber. Either way, it’ll make you dizzy. Once is as it ever was, ever shall be: Gods walk out upon a path of stars. * Is recollection seeing anew, old pieces, rearranged, seemingly? Letting go of nothing suggests: - (like) air conditioning, computer hum. Waiting for nothing. Omphalos; world-centre, mind nadir, still point about which everything revolves. God’s paper chase. Omphalos, mind’s umbilical. Stone sunk to bottom of the lake is memory, incarnation. Mind skip back before instinct saw dark eclipse. Sky shield. Moon boss. Through vast chthonic reservoirs, horizon, swept aside. * So. Earth’s most dramatic ‘bald spot’, (ozone hole) is down to 15 million sq miles over Antarctica as of Oct, 2002. Shrinkage, Big Time. One year’s reading on reduced cfcs doth not a trend make. Is this happy hour? Fewer recalcitrants maced? Hair-gel instead of hair spray? Asthmatic winds rake pebbles in dry Arctic valleys. Presidents and dictators square off. Puritanism v Tribalism. Doomsday’s a syndicated affair. Life’s Good. * I wanted to reach my hand into the side of that mountain. The Romans waited, the Jews died. Made a sacrificial altar, such as Abraham had to his God. A small cave, pocketed at the base of Massada. Better death than surrender - a courageous act for living against the odds. Day by day danger renews, retribution neither diminishes nor goes away. To every Age a new generation, bigger weapons to sound the void. * Your breasts in the mirror, still life of gourds. Bossed shields. The white-washed room peeled, flaked, wooden shutters opened on the small harbour quay - a restaurateur tipped his garbage casually into the Mediterranean. A night of fish bones, cigarette butts, bobbed in an oily slick. West, into shadow, Ant’nošs anchored off the headland, outboard silenced, dynamite exploding like an octopus under a shoal of fish beneath. * Alcatraz not Minoan ruins. Morning mist hangs its garden off Golden Gate bridge. Men in fog loom large. Fog or ram’s horn? Container ship - warrior barge, passes under with another load of Japanese cars to feast upon freeways. ‘Straight guys are at a premium’ you said. (Or so I overheard). Seven months under your roof in your bed. I never got to Texas - never hit Route 66. Marooned on my Isle, deep within that lustful, solitary confinement. * Do words bring to mind flat sided buildings, cliff face, waterfall? Each emotion to its respective season and climate. Age means era, epoch, each physical transformation (our) body plays out. Journey from foot to fossil print, the single breath, misting to humidness. Blood shadows a dense valley; untidy buildings, an old saw-mill; blood thins to Gods’ ichor. I approach you like a drive-in movie. Memory’s what we miss, we spool reels of it. * Serpent-backed bridge profiled: the city, chalk-toned, laid out like a shooting gallery. From Green Point (sub-net ghosting to Georges Head) a V of gulls speedily hugging the harbour; its surface serried, grey disturbances. Wind grain. Yachts coasting, canvas slap. Manly ferries, (green, beige upperwork) slide between white, salt-shaker buoys. Trouble in Paradise? Never! Spring thunder ain’t no car bomb. * One quadrant of sky turns, face up, black as the ace of spades. Much as a God can manage muttering from the side of his mouth. Star flecks, nova spittle. Rage of emptiness pours through, for the hell of it, endlessly. Looking back to what beginning. The whole shebang advances toward, beyond our best efforts. We live under a Niagra of star fall, huge optics dilate time, blackness like velvet slips over chrome. Sounds of nothingness strung between a singlet of lights. * Barrel of the sun, gun-wad, cloud packed, cools to Napoleonic afterglow. The sun is soldier and hero, after all; always on call to strike the last pose, profiling its rays across the grateful landscape. Ragged mountains lift up to meet it, plains puff out chests, the sea a carnival of light, ice packs bristle, glaciers growl. Time spins on a coin. Horizon shakes its dirty mat over cityscape, over glass and concrete conspiracies - roads burn fuses into nightways. * Rubbed off sky exposes an undercoat of white that is really fuzzed, mid-day heat. Birds change over shifts. Things settle. Shadow drops under eaves, tier by tier. Melaleuca is a snowstorm of bloom in a backyard. Planes arrive from here and there; holiday makers, the injured and dead, today’s interchangeable destines. A night club blows up in a tropical paradise. In the slipstream above the stratosphere, fear drifts about the globe as deadly pollen. * The day combustible as a nightclub. Destruction works in big, blunt gestures. An explosion is no rediscovery, it’s return without guide to the deepest sink hole from whence hell’s laughter issues. A sucking into nothingness; void behind the twin masks of light and dark. Not repetition but continuance. Pre-beginnings. A precise point of death qua death, not infinity but limitlessness, pain’s spectrum. * Compression of bees, shrub-shaped, in proton loops, on cushioned air. Spring! See the counter, its bright ticking with fail-safe growth. Who put it there? this tubular, tight package, green and red wires running to hidden terminals - watch the numerals flick over, air fill with warmth, this thing ready to go off at a season’s notice, a bursting forth, flash of filmic green and bloom too quick to catch as we exit our buildings in a rush to see it. * Scent makes the air visible, seasonal; autumn lays its long scaffolding of shadow under wood smoke; winter smells of damp brickwork; spring lifts the lid on lighter smells - is something between cleaning fluids or garden. Only late at night true secrets and scents are disclosed; summer tightens. Scent is a map of an ancient journey. The poem prints - makes a seal of every season, its message delivered and read. An Actual Encounter With The Sun On My Balcony At France Street ( for Gloria Schwartz ) When the moon slipped its knot and left a ring for the night to drop through, and a baggage of stars thudded on the loading bay at the other side of the world, I heard, “Ho! get up you slack-arse poet, I want to have a word with you.” It was the sun. “This is a surprise,” I yawned. “Shouldn’t be - you’re the one whose been whingeing about his own personal light.” “I must admit,” I conceded, “I was worried there for a bit.” “Right,” answered the sun. He spat at the window turning it molten. “You must know by now Stephen, I visit with a poet every thirty years or so. Last time it was Frank O’Hara, and before that, Mayakovsky. Can’t say it’s your turn but I’ll stop by anyway. You’re not a poet for all time but for your own time. Don’t worry about it. And forget those supposed poets the M=E=Z=Z=A=N=I=N=E=S as you call them caught between the floors: they ain’t going nowhere. So get up and make a cup of tea!” “Sure, care to join me?” “Only for a minute,” he said, “I’ve got more important things to do today, like glinting off the Hauraki Gulf and the iron-clad poppy of Sydney Tower. Oh, that reminds me, then I’m off to San Francisco to wake up that ex-girlfriend of yours you keep pissing off with late night calls and false promises.” By now I could see the sun was pretty worked up. “C’mon, forget that crap. You write some good stuff but you’ve got to hang in there, and like me it’ll come to light.” “Thanks sun.” “And knock off the guilt trips and stop getting pissed (in your Sydney dreams, pal!) you’ll burn yourself out - I recognise the signs.” “Yeah, seems I have been a little preoccupied.” The sun jumped onto my balcony outside the window. “You don’t see much of me down here at POETS’ PALACE - do you? Move over, this is the only time I get a look in.” I propped myself up on one elbow. “Remember, you’re not writing bus-timetables and calling it ‘performance poetry’ like a few I could name. Stick with the atmospherics, the true essence of people. That’s your angle, as mine is now to brow beat you. And don’t get into this doomsday kick either, leave such things to the (small minded). Honestly, it’s straight forward focus.” By now my hangover had evaporated. “Hold on sun, I’ve a few questions.” “Sorry,” called the sun, receding. “We’ve had our little talk. Give my regards to Greece again, if you ever get there.” And he was gone and I got up to another beginning, and a day. Stephen Oliver b. 1950. Grew in Brooklyn-west, Wellington, New Zealand. One year Magazine Journalism course, Wellington Polytechnic. Radio NZ Broadcasting School. Casual Radio Actor. Lived in Paris, Vienna, London, San Francisco, Greece and Israel. Signed on with the radio ship, ‘The Voice of Peace’ broadcasting in the Mediterranean out of Jaffa. Free lanced as production voice, newsreader, announcer, voice actor, journalist, radio producer, copy and features writer. Poems widely represented in New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, USA, UK, South Africa, Canada, etc. Recently published, Ballads, Satire & Salt - A Book of Diversions, Greywacke Press, Sydney, 2003. Recently completed a CD of poems and music, titled: KING HIT Selected Readings - poems written and recorded by Stephen Oliver with original music by Matt Ottley designed for international release. He is a transtasman poet and writer who lives in Sydney. This book review is included by the request of the author, and with permission of Nicholas Reid: Stephen Oliver Deadly Pollen [Middletown NJ: Word Riot Press, 2003]; and Ballads, Satire & Salt [Sydney: Greywacke Press, 2003]. Review by Nicholas Reid. First Appeared: JAS Review of Books. Stephen Oliver’s anthology of 2001, Night of Warehouses, brought together the work of a poet who combines an astonishing facility for image with a complete assurance of voice, while showing a deep engagement with the poetic tradition . Two new collections, Ballads, Satire & Salt and Deadly Pollen, will do much to extend that reputation. The former is subtitled ‘A Book of Diversions’ and displays Oliver’s sardonic wit and verbal inventiveness, along with a fine set of illustrations by Matt Ottley. The book’s light verse moves from political satire (‘Think Big’) to a series of reflections on the poets of this and the last generation, ranging from Larkin and Auden to the major figures in recent New Zealand writing. Wit explained is wit ruined, however, and so I shall not comment at length on what is an impressive work. Oliver’s other new collection, Deadly Pollen, is an ambitious undertaking - a meditation, in large measure, on Wallace Stevens and his legacy - and brings together thirty-five short lyrics into a loosely linked sequence which examines the state of the world after 9/11. And the poem is not ‘merely’ political, for it diagnoses a state of spiritual malaise based on fear, a state of crisis in which the role of the poet is in question. So far, so good. But if this is a crisis poem, it is also a crisis in which (and this is my reservation) I find it difficult to believe, though it has been the subject of much recent American commentary. And in any case, there is also an enormous amount to admire in the language and in the range of reference. I can convey something of the fineness of Oliver’s craftsmanship in his translation of Horace’s ‘Pyrrha’ ode, a translation which fits into Oliver’s theme of disillusionment, and of his modernist distrust of beauty in person and in diction. The quiet intensity, and the distanced, almost intellectualized sensuality, of the language in which Oliver brings alive the golden-haired Pyrrha, Horace’s femme fatale, is perfect: Pyrrha, your dewy hair, yellow, scented, doubly wreathed in Jasmine, fresh from the trellis this morning.... (lyric 12) Nor is Oliver’s ambition here as limited as it might seem, for in taking on such a translation Oliver is setting himself up against a history of translations, and most notably one by Milton. It is a challenge in which he succeeds admirably. And in the later lines of the lyric, Oliver marks his disengagement by a withdrawal into a more demotic register. For while he is adept at finding occasion for the lyrical richness of which modernism was always suspicious, he also writes at times in a spare modern voice, as in the following lines which may owe something to the New Zealand poet Curnow’s ‘Canto of Signs’: Rubbed off sky exposes an undercoat of white that is really fuzzed, mid-day heat. Birds change over shifts. Things settle. Shadow drops under eaves, tier by tier .... (lyric 32) The language here has a powerful antipodean flatness, and depends on its laconic pauses. And if ‘things settle’, it is because, as the allusion to Yeats suggests, things are about to fall apart; and we move to images of Bali. Oliver goes on in a following lyric to demonstrate his gift for image, in his intense visualization of Spring’s strange bloom, the terrorist’s bomb: Compression of bees, shrub-shaped, in proton loops, on cushioned air. Spring! See the counter, its bright ticking with fail-safe growth. (lyric 34) Political poets do not always manage to capture so well the estrangement which is necessary for successful social comment. Similarly, Oliver demonstrates an unsettled verbal mastery in a bravura display, a description of architectural form: ... Complex of accented runs, angles, drops, sluices, pumps, ditches, endless unbowed archways... (lyric 11) The language here is finely controlled, from the way in which the ‘x’ sound is perfectly balanced in the opening phrase, to the series of falling monosyllables which are released in the enjambed expansiveness of the final phrase with its open vowels. The language is reminiscent of Les Murray’s ‘Bent Water’ (surely Murray’s masterpiece). But the lines I have just quoted continue in rhythms which, while still lyrical, are also more unsettling: ‘archways, treatment ponds breaking into/sunlight’. For where Murray’s language embodies a confident belief in God, Oliver’s has been a celebration of a public sewer - and more to the point, a sewer envisioned but (in an act of creative failure) never built. Late in the poem, Oliver brings together these themes in a grim reflection upon the role of the poet - in a voice in which the emotion is italicized but never allowed to run outside its bounds: One quadrant of sky turns, face up, black as the ace of spades. Much as a God can manage muttering from the side of his mouth. Star flecks, nova spittle. Rage of emptiness pours through, for the hell of it, endlessly. Looking back to what beginning. The whole shebang advances toward, beyond our best efforts. We live under a Niagra of star fall, huge optics dilate time, blackness like velvet slips over chrome. Sounds of nothingness strung between a singlet of lights. (lyric 30). This is vintage Oliver. The language is elaborate, but perfectly judged, undercut by a colloquial impulse (‘black as the ace of spades’, ‘for the hell / of it’). This undersong speaks of Oliver’s awareness of his place as / a poet of the vernacular republic; but it also speaks, in its use of cliche, of a loss of faith in the resources of poetic language. And something similar can be said of its use of Stevens, for where Stevens is the poet who brought romantic metaphysics to its final crisis, and with it the end of any hope of finding essential meaning in the world, Oliver’s use of Stevens here seems also an act of deliberate failure. The stanza alludes to Stevens’s Jove, a false divinity who ‘moved among us, as a muttering king’ in ‘Sunday Morning’, and to that poem’s existential conclusion that (contra Milton) ‘We live in an old chaos of the sun’. Like Stevens in ‘Key West’, Oliver laments the ‘Blessed rage for order’, the ‘glassy lights’ which gave a bogus sense of structure to the sea. But in a sense, and an important sense, much of the language of Oliver’s stanza is the language of Stevens: it is an eloquent testament to a failure to find in the present a viable voice for poetry. Clearly there is much in this sequence which I find powerful, and respond to warmly. Many of the lyrics are perfect, and thematically the poem traverses many of the issues which are at the heart of poetry today: from the modernist legacy of deep worries over memory and metaphor, to a more contemporary juxtaposition of dictions and registers, and a concern with post-modernism and the end of history. It is a sequence which is not afraid to take on Stevens, or Milton and Hardy and Auden. But I would like to see it slightly reshaped, for I feel that there is a great poem hiding in here somewhere, if only I could be persuaded more of its motivation. I think fear does lie at the heart of its psychology, but the real fear is artistic rather than political; and if this could be worked more into the texture of the poem, along with some editing of the poem’s middle section, we would have a major achievement not only in Oliver’s oeuvre, but in antipodean writing. *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEADLY POLLEN *** Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will be renamed. Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and trademark. 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