A.R.D Fairburn: Selected Poems

By A.R.D. Fairburn and Mac Jackson

Poet, wit and controversialist, A.R.D. Fairburn was one of the best-known New Zealanders of his time. This volume represents the full range and vitality of his verse. Accompanying the well known anthology pieces such as 'The Cave' and 'A Farewell' are ballads like 'Walking on My Feet' and 'The Rakehelly Man', as well as a generous selection of his early love lyrics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victoria University Press
• Release date: May 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780864737380

Book preview

A.R.D. Fairburn

Selected Poems

Edited by

Mac Jackson

Victoria University Press

CONTENTS 

Title Page

Introduction

Winds

Meeting

Song (‘Oh, youth has thoughts a-plenty’)

Hellas

Release

Since that Zenophila

Song at Dawn

The Flowers

The Sun has Spread his Shining Wings

The Old Bridge

Wish

In the Younger Land

Kowhai

Evening

Amarantus

Odysseus (‘Odysseus, the old wanderer’)

Wandering Willie’s Song

All I Have Desired

Diogenes

Odysseus (‘I have come back as a stone falls to earth’)

Dead Man’s Tale

Rhyme of the Dead Self

Disquisition on Death

Winter Night

On Entering a New Abode

Straw

Deserted Farmyard

Empty House

The Sea

First Things

Dominion

Utopia

Album Leaves

Imperial

Back Street

One Race, One Flag

Wedding Group

Stages of History

The Possessor

Conversation in the Bush

Elements

Dialogue

Struggle in a Mirror

To Daphnis and Chloe in the Park

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Night Song

Full Fathom Five

Poem

A Farewell

Yes Please Gentlemen

Milton

Good and Ill

Tapu

Well Known and Well Loved

Love Song

The Cave

Wild Love

The Revenge

Laughter

The Rakehelly Man

Walking on my Feet

Noon Song

Song (‘My head to my heart has said’)

The Encounter

Song at Summer’s End

Epitaph

For an Amulet

The Fallen

To a Friend in the Wilderness

Beggar to Burgher

To an Expatriate

Logos

Solitude

The Estuary

Now

Song for a Girl

Sea-Wind and Setting Sun

Tom’s A-cold

I’m Older than You, Please Listen

Terms of Appointment

Down on my Luck

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index of Titles and First Lines

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

THE MAN

‘One of the most remarkable men ever to have been born in the southern hemisphere’,¹ A.R.D. Fairburn pursued his many interests with an idiosyncratic flair and vitality that endeared him to friends and bemused the puritanical New Zealand public of his adult years. Peripatetic philosopher who ‘would argue the hind leg off a cow’,² he spent over three decades teasing, heckling and chiding his countrymen in talk and in print. Passionate about ideas, this espouser of causes and tireless commentator on the arts, politics, economics, education and local customs was no less devoted to compost, boats and a game of golf. His journalism ranged from forecasts about the 1948 American presidential elections, through appreciation of the National Orchestra, to caveats on the pasteurisation of milk. His columns posed such questions as ‘Should writers be encouraged?’ and ‘Could parliament be improved?’ (‘Well, Guy Fawkes thought so …’). His letters to the editor covered topics as various as Fred Hoyle’s theories about the universe, the indecency of an all-white All Black tour of South Africa (where ‘an oppressed race and their oppressors live together in a bond of hatred’), Auckland municipal elections, brass band playing (‘a boisterous form of athletics’) and iodised salt.³ In prose that was invariably lucid, concrete and witty, he mocked earnest pretension, celebrated the creative and intellectual life, explored the burning issues of the day, and defended humane liberal values against humbug, wowserism, philistinism and cant.

‘Renaissance man’, in the eyes of English poet Edmund Blunden,⁴ Fairburn also played the role of sardonic court jester. Painter and fabric-printer, erratic kiwi handyman and thick-fingered bush-carpenter, pagan worshipper of sun, sea and the great outdoors, long-distance swimmer with a six foot three inches frame, gadfly in a society suffering from ‘spiritual lethargy’, Fairburn restlessly sought a religio, a mode of existence, that would confer meaning, uniting mind and body, individual and environment. He was a key figure among those of his generation who provoked their country into self-examination and a broadening of cultural horizons. His friend Douglas Robb saw him ‘in the role of the cheese-starter’: ‘just as a cheese-starter helps to mature cheese, so Rex helped to mature literary and artistic thought in New Zealand’.⁵ Denys Trussell’s fine biography, Fairburn (1984), places the many-sided poet within a phase of development not only of his homeland but of the Western world.

The outlines of his life may be briefly sketched. His grandfather, Edwin Fairburn, son of Bay of Islands missionaries, was the eleventh white child born in New Zealand, in 1827. Rex Fairburn (Arthur Rex Dugard) was born in Auckland, 2 February 1904, the eldest of three brothers. His father, Arthur, was an employee of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company who became the firm’s accountant. His mother, Teresa, had been a piano teacher and governess. Rex attended Auckland Grammar School, where he struck up an enduring friendship with R.A.K. Mason. From 1922 he worked for four years as an insurance clerk before taking a four-month trip to Norfolk Island. Late in August 1930 he boarded a ship bound for England, where his volume of verse He Shall Not Rise was published. In London he met people prominent in literature and the arts. He tramped through France and Spain, wrote for The New English Weekly, as well as reporting back to New Zealand newspapers, and in Wiltshire married Jocelyn Mays, an Aucklander who had been studying at the Slade School of Fine Arts. They were to have three daughters and one son, the first child being born before their return voyage to Auckland towards the end of 1932.

Fairburn thus exchanged England’s economic depression for New Zealand’s. He joined the thousands of unemployed, undertaking relief work on the roads, advocating Douglas Social Credit and supplementing his meagre income with payments for freelance articles. Lack of money was a lifelong complaint. In 1934 he became assistant secretary of the Auckland branch of the New Zealand Farmers’ Union and subeditor of Farming First.

Over the next fifteen years he remained busy as polemicist, journalist, social analyst, editor, lampoonist and poet. He formed a network of friendships that included many of the significant New Zealand makers and thinkers of the time. It was in 1940 that he first stayed at Terry Bond’s home on the Mahurangi peninsula, north of Auckland; this was to become the coastal Mecca luring him in ‘To a Friend in the Wilderness’. And it was during this period that he began his voluminous, often dazzlingly zany correspondence with Denis Glover.

His prose pamphlets and booklets included an indictment of the New Zealand Herald entitled Who Said Red Ruin? (1938), a Joycean ‘pollytickle parrotty’ of Michael Joseph Savage called The Sky is a Limpet (dated 1939, but not published till 1940), and the essay We New Zealanders (1944). In 1943 – after several months as an intractable military trainee – he was transferred into the New Zealand Broadcasting Service, where he worked for four years. Wellington bureaucrats were, he said, ‘so tight, they wouldn’t allow

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to spend a quid on a landline to broadcast the Second Coming with the original cast’.⁶ In 1944 he also began a five-year stint as editor of the Compost Magazine, a forum from which he vigorously supported Dove Meyer Robinson’s ultimately successful Auckland campaign against the Brown’s Island sewerage scheme.

In 1947 Fairburn resigned from the Broadcasting Service and earned a living through the hand-blocking of fabric designs based on Maori cave drawings; for thirty years his curtains hung in Government House, and prints sold in the United Nations Gift Shop in New York. In 1948 a friend from his days in London, Lucy Wertheim, organised through Fairburn the gift to the Auckland City Art Gallery of a large collection of contemporary British paintings, and in that same year he was appointed to a tutorship in the English Department of Auckland University College. In 1950 he became a lecturer at the university’s Elam School of Fine Arts.

In 1956 he underwent an operation to remove a tumour from the left kidney. The carcinoma was, he wrote to Glover, ‘sent to Wellington for full diagnosis’: he pictured it ‘roaring through the Waikato, rocking through the gorges of the King Country, rolling onward through the dark, pausing briefly for a cup of tea and a pie at Taumarunui, then once more being hurtled southward, ever southward – at last emerging from the tunnel and being met at the station of the Capital City by … some pathetic porter from the Pathology Dept. Just to think of the party you could have thrown it, had you only known.’⁷ Fairburn died at his Devonport home on 25 March 1957.

Like any complex personality, Fairburn’s was a mass of contradictions. He was a ‘tribal man’ who often felt a misfit. Gregarious, a centre of attention at parties, he formed a lifetime habit of going on solitary walkabouts. Poetic celebrant of ‘the instant of joy’ and exuberant clown, he was subject to fits of the blackest melancholia. Zealous about a host of activities, he was periodically plagued by a sense of profound futility. Ardent lover of life, he was haunted by fears of death. His poetry ranges the full gamut of his attitudes and moods.

REPUTATION

At the time of his death Fairburn was widely regarded as New Zealand’s foremost poet. In New Zealand Literature: A Survey (1959), E.H. McCormick gave him prominence in a chapter on writers who had emerged during that key decade in our national literary history, ‘The Thirties’. The lyrics of Strange Rendezvous were seen as celebrating love ‘in all its complexity’ – carnal, spiritual, youthful, wild, domesticated: ‘Sensuous, passionate, profound, these love poems are unique in our literature.’ ‘To a Friend in the Wilderness’ was praised as ‘a splendid affirmation’ of the poet’s ‘humanistic faith’: ‘Of no poem can it be said more truly that it gives form and consciousness to the anarchy of life in New Zealand.’⁸ Selections from Fairburn’s verse occupied more pages than anybody else’s in Allen Curnow’s expanded Caxton anthology, A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923–1950 (1951) and in his The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1960). As early as 1947 Curnow had judged: ‘There has been no other New Zealand poet whose verse, over such a range of theme and form, displays such energy, sureness, and positive command – within whatever limits – of the lyric or ballad tradition; nor one who knows better the language he writes in.’⁹ And in the introduction to his Penguin book Curnow praised ‘To a Friend’: ‘in his final poetic testament … he has spoken the truth of his joy uniquely, and for his countrymen’.¹⁰ In a Landfall review of Three Poems and Strange Rendezvous, Denis Glover had hailed ‘the publication of these two books within a few months of each other’ as ‘the most important event in our poetry for a number of