The coexistence of poets of so many different generations (with their varying conceptions and practices) makes for an unprecedentedly diversified scene, and this has been accentuated by the emergence within the past decade of strong groups of poets associated with the women’s movement on the one hand and the resurgence of Māori culture on the other.

The death of Denis Glover in 1980 left Allen Curnow as the sole survivor of the pre-war generation of poets. Glover’s final literary act was to put together a Selected Poems (Penguin, 1981) which reveals a shrewd recognition that his best work was done in the 1940s and 1950s, despite the prolific output of his last years.

His friend Curnow (who contributes an excellent introduction to the Glover book) has, however, got better and better with the passing years. Curnow said recently that having survived all his contemporaries he now conceives himself as writing for them, a Yeatsian remark from a poet who has come more and more to resemble Yeats not least in his longevity and the magnificence of his verse in old age.

The full range of Curnow’s achievement is on display in two books published in 1982 – Selected Poems (Penguin) and You Will Know When You Get There: Poems 1979-81 (Auckland University Press). The selection omits Curnow’s earliest work but contains almost everything written in the four decades between the 1939 sequence Not in Narrow Seas and the 1979 sequence An Incorrigible Music, affording the opportunity to follow his development from self-conscious provincial melancholia (the ‘great gloom. . . in a land of settlers / with never a soul at home’) to the magisterial, locally grounded, cosmopolitan sweep of Moro Assassinato’ (his stunning long poem about the abduction and execution of the Italian politician Aldo Moro by the Red Brigade). The poems in his book of new work are remarkable for their diversity, their technical virtuosity and their tough eloquence, especially those (such as the title poem) which confront with grace and courage the imminence of death. Perhaps the most startling of them is ‘Organo Ad Libitum’ which collapses various times, places, and levels of reality into a bizarre fantasia of sex and death.

James K. Baxter, the only New Zealand poet whose achievement is comparable with Curnow’s, died in 1972 at the age of forty-six, but the full scale of his work has only become apparent with the publication in 1980 of his Collected Poems (Oxford University Press), edited by John Weir. This monumental 650-page collection includes the contents of all Baxter’s books plus about 300 poems selected from a vast number of unpublished poems. Invaluable as the collected edition is, most readers will find Baxter’s work more accessible in the same editor’s Selected Poems (OUP, 1982), which contains about 250 poems and includes in full the most important of Baxter’s late sequence such as ‘Pig Island Letters’, ‘Jerusalem Sonnets’, and ‘Autumn Testament’. The Selected Poems makes clearer than ever before the main lines of Baxter’s development from a brilliantly precocious youngster writing in the shadow of his older compatriots (Curnow, Glover, Mason, Fairburn), through a difficult and complex phase of rebellion and transition, to a tough-minded, flexible, and utterly distinctive maturity in the last decade of his career. In his final years Baxter turned away from Pakeha (white) society towards the aroha (love in its many connotations) invested in rural Māori communal life. The verse he wrote in this period is regarded by many as the finest of his career, ranging as it does with breathtaking casualness from the mundane details of daily living to the sublimities of religious revelation.

Baxter’s immersion in Māoritanga coincided with a renaissance of Māori culture which has seen the birth of a vigorous Māori literature in English. The elders of this movement in poetry were Alistair Campbell and Hone Tuwhare. Campbell came to New Zealand from the Cook Islands as a child but it was not until the 1960s that he began exploring his Polynesian inheritance in verse. His evolution towards a multicultural perspective is displayed in his Collected Poems (Alister Taylor, 1981) which culminates in a fine recent sequence deriving from his first return to his Pacific homeland. Hone Tuwhare’s humour, warmth, lyricism, metaphorical vividness, and rhythmic muscularity have brought him wide popularity, especially though readings. His Selected Poems (John McIndoe) appeared in 1981, and a further selection (with some new poems), Year of the Dog (McIndoe), in 1982. (Only Sam Hunt, whose Collected Poems, Penguin 1980, sold more than 15,000 copies and whose last book Running Scared, Whitcoulls, 1982, sold out an edition of 4,000 before publication, has earned a larger audience – mostly through his indefatigable and entertaining performances.)

A younger generation of Māori poets can be sampled in the important anthology (which also includes fiction and drama) Into the World of Light, edited by Witi Ihimaera and Don Long (Heinemann, 1982). The best of the young Māori poets are probably Apirana Taylor (Three Shades, Voice Press, 1981), whose verse is taut, emphatic, and outspoken, and especially Keri Hulme, whose first book The Silences Between (Moeraki Conversations) (Auckland University Press, 1982) combines delicacy and forcefulness to great effect.

Keri Hulme is also representative of the strong impact women poets have made in recent years. There have always been good women poets in New Zealand going back to the beginning of the century (Blanche Baughan, Ursula Bethell, Robin Hyde, Ruth Dallas, Fleur Adcock) but there was something of a hiatus in the 1960s and 1970s which has now been decisively filled. The first group to make an impact were women who started writing relatively late in life – in their thirties, forties, and even fifties. These poets have all continued to improve and are writing prolifically as if to make up for lost time. This group includes Meg Campbell (The Way Back, 1980, A Durable Fire, 1982, both Te Kotare Press), Lauris Edmond (Salt from the North, 1981, Catching Up, 1983, both OUP), Rachel McAlpine (Fancy Dress, Cicada, 1980) and Elizabeth Smither (Casanova’s Ankle, OUP, 1981, The Legend of Macello Mastroianni’s Wife, Auckland UP, 1981). Campbell’s verse is marked by candour, clarity, and a skilful if undemonstrative technique; Edmond is fluent and colourful when she curbs a tendency to pontificate and moralise; Rachel McAlpine’s work gets bolder and freer all the time without losing the bite which first brought her to attention; Smither’s small, dense, allusive, and elusive lyrics are uneven in quality but are the distinctive products of a curious and highly literate intelligence.

It is interesting to note that of the new writers to appear in the 1980s the most accomplished and promising have all been women. These would include Heather McPherson (A Figurehead; a Face, Spiral, 1982), the first New Zealander to write from an explicitly lesbian-feminist perspective; Joanna Paul, whose Unwrapping the Body (Bothwell 1981) intriguingly combines photography and calligraphy; and Cilla McQueen, whose Homing In (John MclIndoe, 1982) is (with Keri Hulme’s) the most appealing first collection of the 1980s. Her poems are full of fresh and lively detail, and are expressive of a unique and refined sensibility as well as possessing considerable formal interest.

Space does not permit anything like a full account of all other poets active in the 1980s; reference to a few highlights will have to suffice. The shift towards the longer poem or sequence which first became apparent in the early 1970s in New Zealand has continued into the 1980s. Among the most accomplished practitioners are C.K. Stead, Vincent O’Sullivan, and Ian Wedde.

Stead’s Geographies (Auckland UP, 1982) includes several long poems organised according to Poundian principles; ‘Scoria’ is intensive (a kind of literary archeology of the city of Auckland, the poet’s birthplace and home), while ‘Yes T.S.’ is extensive (the journal of a global circumnavigation by jet). Stead’s work is inventive, lucid, and expert, though some readers feel it lacks compulsion.

O’Sullivan’s Brother Jonathan. Brother Kafka (OUP, 1980) is a book-length sequence of poems in quatrains which uses the Puritan Jonathan Edwards and Kafka as parameters for a set out personal and philosophical meditations; his The Butcher Papers (OUP, 1982), gives expression through the dramatic mask of the crass Butcher to O’Sullivan’s mixed loathing for and fascination with the ethos of his native land. A prolific if uneven poet O’Sullivan has also recently brought out a book of shorter poems, The Rose Ballroom (Mclndoe, 1982). Ian Wedde is probably the most enterprising and versatile poet of his generation. His last book Castaly (Auckland UP, 1980) shows a poet with the courage to dismantle and modify a style he brought close to perfection in ‘Pathway to the Sea’ (a hugely vital celebration of the functioning of the planet’s ecosystem); his more recent poems are fluid, open-ended, oblique, unstable in tone, with the power to continuously stimulate and provoke.

The infusion of new ideas and influences into New Zealand poetry in the 1970s, especially from the United States and Continental Europe, has been fully assimilated in the work of the better poets such as Bill Manhire and Murray Edmond. Manhire’s Good Looks (Auckland UP, 1982) demonstrates the capacity of this strikingly idiosyncratic poet to develop and enlarge his range. His mysteriously opaque lyrics have now been joined by poems which make more concessions to the reader’s understanding, either by adopting a disarming directness or by assuming the structure of enigmatic narratives which tease and stimulate the imagination. Murray Edmond’s End Wall (OUP, 1981) is a resonant and well-constructed collection of poems which mostly originate in but are not confined by immediate (often domestic) experience; it shows a steady advance over his earlier books.

Most of the poets discussed in this survey are represented in either or both of two recent anthologies, Fifteen Contemporary New Zealand Poets, edited by Alistair Paterson (Pilgrims South Press, 1980) and Contemporary New Zealand Poetry, edited by Fleur Adcock (OUP, 1982). Paterson is an exponent of American-derived ‘open form’ poetics (and also a practitioner, as in Qu’appelle, Pilgrims South, 1982) and has included the work of several worthwhile poets not otherwise mentioned here (Michael Harlow, Rob Jackaman, Alan Loney, David Mitchell) as well as work by Curnow, McAlpine, Smither, Stead, and Wedde. Adcock’s collection is more catholic in range and includes work by Kendrick Smithyman, Louis Johnson, Michael Jackson, and Tony Beyer in addition to most of the poets discussed in this article. Neither of these anthologies is fully satisfactory; Paterson is too sectarian and inconsistent in the application of his principles, and Adcock, who lives in London, is too safe and predictable in her choices. The fact of the matter is that recent New Zealand poetry is both too copious and too various to be adequately housed within the covers of a single collection, a situation which is as welcome as it is largely unprecedented.