Seeing You Asked

 

There’s a dozen things I might tell you.
There’s a Chinese poem to begin with
of a woman folding curtains as she leaves
a man, forever. There is a Roman writing
from the edge of ice-fields, a vista
of dull silver beyond clicking reeds,
to a woman who watches a blue smoking
mountain in almost unbearable heat.
There are wartime movies with sad bridges
across morning rivers, the woman pressing
the two wings of her collar together
as a train draws out. There’s the story
as well of a woman driving north
towards a lake, a lake that was once fire,
a house by the lake, a life inside the house,
where today’s love becomes another fiction
you open when the room is empty,
put down when you hear voices, stand
up, smiling, at life where it happens . . .
There’s no end to certain stories,
as the plot has no desperate turns, the vase
on the bedside table burns with azaleas
whatever happens. But love, we say,
love, there are corners on the stairways,
there are fragments in each hour,
when the notes drift back, the ones
scarcely heard – just as the lake is always
beside you, spreading out, and out.
You say swim, you read, you fish.
There is something like the glint of a hook,
there is something, love, in that shimmering
vault, trolling too fast to speak of.

 

Vincent O’Sullivan
from Seeing You Asked, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 1998

‘Seeing You Asked’ by Vincent O’Sullivan is a big poem concerned with fiction. There are so many stories we can tell. But is there not also ‘something’ that eludes our telling. The poem is a homage to the unsayable. Saying the thing we can’t say is, of course, the work of poetry. There’s a certain playfulness here because the poem itself does attempt to get at the thing we can’t say.

The first line opens like an inviting door – ‘There’s a dozen things I might tell you’ – matter-of-fact and captivating: what are these things you might tell me?

The ‘tellings’ that follow are food that leave a reader hungry. I want to know more about the Roman ‘writing from the edge of ice fields’ and I definitely want to know more about ‘the woman pressing/ the two wings of her collar together/ as the train draws out’.

Vincent the poet is working in concert with Vincent the novelist. Each of the tellings are like synopsis, unpacked they could be novels. The desire to know more propels us through the poem while the accessible tone belies a heft and poignancy: The folding in of those ‘wings’ as the train leaves – they will not lift the woman from that ‘sad bridge’. It’s a war movie we are in the thick of yet all war could be described as a ‘sad bridge’ – the two sides that never meet.

A love of resonant detail is at the fore. Vincent is quietly mercurial as a poet: combining economy with the generosity of digression. The Roman writing from the edge of ice fields has a vista before him ‘of dull silver beyond clicking reeds.’ It’s not just that he writes to a woman but that he writes to a woman ‘who watches a blue smoking/mountain in almost unbearable heat’. They are seasons apart, the very temperature between the two of them is at odds.

The poem has relatively even line lengths, there are no stanza breaks. Within this seemingly seamless form there’s a rich modulation of pace. Opening slow until the midline break in the twelfth line. We then freewheel across eight lines, a freewheel that’s done with exquisite control:

                                   (…) There’s the story
as well of a woman driving north
towards a lake, a lake that was once fire,
a house by the lake, a life inside the house,
where today’s love becomes another fiction
you open when the room is empty,
put down when you hear voices, stand
up, smiling, at life where it happens . . .

This is one of the beating hearts of the poem. As readers we immerse in a story as if it were a here and now, we are in the thick of it, until someone else enters the room and we put down the book to greet ‘life where it happens …’

There’s a great deal in these eight lines – ‘a house by the lake, a life inside the house’ echoing for me that hand gesture rhyme played as a child ‘here is the church, here is the steeple …’.  The two lines that follow almost warrant an essay in themselves:

‘today’s love becomes another fiction
you open when the room is empty’

The way the lines are cast it’s not only that ‘you’ open the book that tells the love story from the past but that ‘you open when the room is empty’ as if it were safe/possible now for you to open up.

The conjuring of a present, a sleight of hand device, in turn enables a reflection on where fiction sits in our lives. The poem is an enactment. And, in this way, not only a reflection on fiction and story-telling but also a reflection on the nature of time itself.

Our confidence is gained through the calibrated detail and the rich patterning of feeling and thought. We know we are in safe hands. This carries us to the final turn in the poem more than willing to reach for the unreachable. It’s a beautiful flight:

                                 (…) But love, we say,
love, there are corners on the stairways,
there are fragments in each hour,
when the notes drift back, the ones
scarcely heard
(…)
There is something like the glint of a hook,
there is something, love, in that shimmering
vault, trolling too fast to speak of.

It’s almost as if this moment has had to earned. Yet what is given here is part and parcel of human experience: the experience of not being able to catch hold of our experience. The experience of love, thankfully, has never been nailed down.

Vincent’s sensibility honours the everyday, often the domestic; yet he is equally receptive to the illusive, what, in Seamus Heaney’s work, might be called ‘a marvel’.

‘Seeing You Asked’ echoes back to an earlier poem, ‘Look Sheila Seeing You’ve Asked Me’ (from the sequence The Butcher Papers, Oxford University Press, 1982). The question Sheila seems to have asked Butcher is: what is life? Butcher being Butcher, he approaches the question with a rollick: ‘Life is not a horse with a winner’s garland/ on it’s sweaty neck’ (…) ‘not quite a flushy sunset and its pouring ribbons/ from God’s theoretic bosom’. If only life could be pinned down but it keeps slipping Butcher’s grasp with what is not easily put into words: feelings of celebration or that ‘flushy sunset’ with its inexplicable beauty. Till Butcher himself has to own the unnameable: ‘Yet I don’t know what it is says Butcher (…) if not this as well –’.

                        which is light walking
the dreamy edge of steel
which is pulse where his wrist lies on complacent death
which is water pure as silence before speech is thought of
from the tap in the back room
                                   splashed on face, on boots,
as he stands with chin tingling,
with feet like jewels.

The experience of wonder (as with love) is something that we can’t quite pin down: ‘water pure as silence before speech is thought of’. To give such a moment to a character like raucous, blokey Butcher is an inspired act.

The lines above are some of my favourite from Vincent’s work, they enact an experience that evades all metrics. Wonder is like an endangered species. Yet it’s one of the qualities in our relationships with each other, and with the natural world, that opens our imagination and enhances feelings of kinship.

Thanks Paula, for the opportunity to celebrate two of Vincent’s poems. I’m going to miss him a great deal, many people are going to miss him a great deal. It feels like the conversation isn’t over.

Born in Auckland in 1937, Vincent O’Sullivan was one of New Zealand’s leading writers, acclaimed for his poetry, plays, short stories, and novels, which include Let the River Stand, Believers to the Bright Coast, and the Ockham-shortlisted All This By Chance. He was joint editor with Margaret Scott of the internationally acclaimed five-volume Letters of Katherine Mansfield, edited a number of major anthologies, and was the author of widely praised biographies of John Mulgan and Ralph Hotere. He taught at Waikato University and Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, and was the New Zealand Poet Laureate for 2013–2015. In 2000, Vincent was made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, and in 2021 he was redesignated as a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit. He died in April 2024.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page

Rhian Gallagher’s first poetry book, Salt Water Creek, was published in London (Enitharmon Press, 2003) and short-listed for the Forward Prize for First Collection. In 2007 Gallagher won a Canterbury History Foundation Award which led to the publication of her book, Feeling for Daylight: The Photographs of Jack Adamson. She also received the 2008 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award. Her second poetry collection Shift, (Auckland University Press 2011, Enitharmon Press, UK, 2012) won the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry. Freda: Freda Du Faur, Southern Alps, 1909-1913 was produced in collaboration with printer Sarah M. Smith and printmaker Lynn Taylor in 2016 (Otakou Press). Rhian was the Robert Burns Fellow in 2018. Her third poetry collection Far-Flung (AUP) appeared in 2020. Gallagher lives in Dunedin.