SOURCE: Sturm, Terry. “New Zealand Poetry.” In A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, edited by Neil Roberts, pp. 293-303. Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.

[In the following essay, Sturm offers an account of New Zealand poetry, stressing that although other forms of writing have existed alongside it, it is the poetry of New Zealand that most consistently reflects the ongoing cultural debate in that country.]

A generation ago there would have been widespread agreement about the general shape an account of New Zealand poetry would take. It would have confined itself to poetry in English, and identified a development in two phases: a colonial period of largely Anglophile mimic-verse, lasting from the beginnings of European settlement in the 1840s until the early decades of the twentieth century, followed, in the key decade of the 1930s, by the emergence of powerful nationalist impulses, aligned to modernist developments overseas. These transformed the direction of poetry, establishing a local tradition and the beginnings of a canon. In the later 1960s, however, this dominant cultural nationalist paradigm, buttressed as it often was by romanticist organic metaphors of the birth and maturing of colonies into nations, began to crumble, unable to contain the sheer diversity of poetic impulses—experimental, post-modern, postcolonial, feminist, indigenous—which characterized the practice of poets during the last three decades of the century. This new work has in turn prompted new readings, new mappings, of the past, problematizing the very notion of ‘New Zealand poetry’, as well as the apparent stabilities of nation, location and language on which it had been based.

None of the shifts identified above occurred without protracted and lively debates—about particular authors, about the nature of poetry itself (in particular, about what its proper subject matter in New Zealand should be), about the broader context of the kind of society New Zealand was, its history, its ‘place in the world’, and its future. In fact throughout the twentieth century New Zealand produced an unusually rich discourse of poetics, articulated through influential anthologies and the arguments they generated, as well as through lively, if often shortlived, literary magazines and the small presses which supported them. Although other forms of New Zealand writing, including non-fiction, began to attract attention within the ambit of postcolonial, postmodernist and feminist theory in the 1980s, poetics has remained a key instance of discourse about the culture as a whole. For these reasons it provides the starting point for this account of ‘New Zealand poetry’.

THE COLONIAL INHERITANCE

It was the poet Allen Curnow, in his most considered foray into poetics, the introduction to his anthology, The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1960), who articulated most persuasively the notion of a ‘historical divide’ separating the first eight decades of the country's ‘literature’ (1840-1920) from the subsequent three or four decades (1920/1930-60), asserting that this was ‘the most significant fact to be regarded in any realistic retrospect’ on the country's literary history (Curnow, 1987, p. 137). The historical divide marked a huge social and cultural shift, ‘away from colonialism and on towards the island nation of the past three or four decades’ (ibid., p. 135). It also involved a redrawing of boundaries, an anti-colonialist breaking of New Zealand's direct cultural line to England and a nationalist redrawing of that line as a circle around and containing ‘New Zealand’, the demarcation of an internal space whose characterizing feature—the signature of the national—is geographical, locational and historical ‘difference’: ‘peculiar pressures … arising from the isolation of the country, its physical character, and its history’ (ibid., p. 133).

Curnow's reading of colonial poetry focused on the destructive psychic effects of colonial dislocation and dependence, and on a growing split between ‘imagination’ and ‘culture’ on the one hand (the province of what had been formed in England, and become increasingly fossilized) and on the other the practical work of colonization and settlement which by the early twentieth century had hardened into an obstinate, philistine materialism and conformism. Few of the scores of colonial poets who inhabited New Zealand's first significant national anthology (Alexander and Currie's New Zealand Verse, 1906) escaped critical scrutiny. What survived was, rather, a handful of poems, read as in some way avoiding the general cultural malaise and offering glimpses of the real experience of colonization: accurate reflections of the strangenesses of landscape and seascape, renderings of sensibility less strident or sentimental than the standard rhymed genuflexions to Empire and colonial Destiny. In this respect at least Curnow's project was entirely successful. Neither of the two national anthologies which appeared after the 1960 Penguin—a new Penguin anthology, edited by Ian Wedde and Harvey McQueen, in 1985, and The Oxford Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English, edited by Jenny Bornholdt, Gregory O'Brien and Mark Williams, in 1997—included more than a handful of nineteenth-century poems.

THE MAORI TRADITION

Alexander and Currie, like most critics at the turn of the century, had singled out as a potentially distinctive feature of New Zealand poetry the ‘colourful’ narrative possibilities of Maori myths and legends. The vast colonial body of poeticized Maori myths and legends was almost wholly drawn from Sir George Grey's collection, Polynesian Mythology (1855). Grey's preface to that volume, which explained why, as governor of the colony, he had undertaken the project—‘I could neither successfully govern, nor hope to conciliate, a numerous and turbulent people, with whose language, manners, customs, religion, and modes of thought I was quite unacquainted’—indicates how indivisible the project's political and cultural motives were. The prototype of the many poetic appropriations of Maori myth that followed in the wake of Grey's collection was Alfred Domett's Ranolf and Amohia: A South-Sea Day-Dream, an epic of twenty-five cantos published in London in 1872 and (revised) in 1883. Domett, also a leading political figure in the colony, derived the form of his poem from the high European tradition of epic, much of his versification from Longfellow's treatment of the Hiawatha legend in the United States, and his philosophy from the discourse of religious belief and doubt in Victorian England. The elaborateness and intricacy of its format and versification—a distinctive feature of almost all colonial verse—was primarily a demonstrative act of affiliation with Britishness, epitomizing local anxieties about colonial identity in a country remote from the centre of High Culture.

Perhaps by way of reaction against the wholesale appropriation of Maori culture by their precursors, poets of the nationalist period tended to avoid or evade the complications of indigenous/settler relations, in their explorations of identity. Indeed, although the nationalist paradigm emphasized ‘difference’ from England, internal cultural differences were relegated to the margins in order to promote the construction of an inclusive settler/national identity in an essentially unpeopled, unhistoried landscape. Such gestures, in the poetry of Charles Brasch and others, in their search, as Alex Calder puts it, ‘for a deeper relation of settler to place’ often ‘repeat colonial patterns’ which they otherwise condemn (Calder, 1998, p. 172), and in the process Maori poetry itself was relegated to an earlier pre-settlement era, as if belonging to a museum of the past.

The tradition of poetry composed in the Maori language is in fact rich, copious and ongoing into the present. Much of it has not been committed to print, and remains vested in tribal memory. However, from among the thousands of texts in archives and libraries an exceptional record of 400 waiata (sung poems) of many kinds and from many different tribal sources—the product of decades of scholarly work by Sir Apirana Ngata between the 1920s and 1950, and by his successor Pei Te Hurunui Jones—appeared in four volumes under the title Nga Moteatea (‘The Songs’) in 1959, 1961, 1970 and 1990. Numerous other collections of translations began to appear after the 1960s, notably Mervyn McLean and Margaret Orbell's Traditional Songs of the Maori and Orbell's Waiata Maori Songs in History, a collection which illustrated the ways in which nineteenth-century waiata represented the transformations (political, religious, linguistic) wrought by colonization and settlement. In the wake of this growing awareness of the indigenous inheritance, the editors of the new 1985 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse controversially included representations of the ongoing Maori-language tradition (including sixteen twentieth-century poets), accompanied by translations and interspersed among the English-language poems. The poets were presented chronologically, but the editors were also interested to emphasize differences of cultural perspective. One of Curnow's best-known early poems of settler alienation, ‘House and Land’ (1941), appeared beside a waiata tangi (elegy) by Arapeta Awatere in which the sense of personal loss is contained within an indigenous frame of explanatory myth of precisely the kind that seemed unavailable to Curnow's displaced settlers, ‘with never a soul at home’.

In fact, the intersections of English and Maori traditions became increasingly complex from the 1950s onwards. James K. Baxter, in his later poetry especially, was able to achieve an inwardness of reference to Maori values and spirituality, as if he had at last found the master narrative whose absence had driven him to poetry throughout his life. His contemporary, Alistair Campbell—of mixed Rarotongan and Scottish descent—drew strongly on Polynesian rhythms and metaphors in his earlier poems of the 1950s, and later moved increasingly into Maori and Pacific subject matter. In the late 1950s, also, New Zealand's first major Maori poet writing in English, Hone Tuwhare, began publishing, and his voice immediately cut across the polarized poetic debates of the time, which were both generational and regional, and focused on what was felt to be the narrowness of cultural nationalism's emphasis on geographical isolation, landscape and history. Initially a poet of formal lyric eloquence with a rich vein of allusiveness to Maori metaphors, myths and distinctive cultural knowledge, his poetry became increasingly freer and more hybrid, increasingly a mode of highly skilled, subtly charged conversation in which formal and informal registers of New Zealand English and Maori speech meet, collide, mix and comment on each other. By the 1980s the term ‘Maori poetry’ covered a wide range of practice, some poets composing wholly in the traditional forms of waiata, some writing wholly in English, and others writing in varying proportions in both languages.

EXPATRIATISM

The phenomenon of expatriatism, invariably significant in all colonial societies, as settler writers seek to negotiate their peripheral relationship to the cultural ‘centre’, could be accommodated within nationalism provided that the writer could be interpreted as ‘discovering’ his or her nationality through absence. New Zealand's cultural icon of such self-discovery in the earlier part of the century is Katherine Mansfield, but nationalism was also able to read other writers this way—most notably the 1930s poet, Robin Hyde, for whom the final eighteen months of her life, travelling in China and then to London, seemed to crystallize the discovery of a poetic identity which had largely eluded her as long as she stayed in New Zealand. However, there was always a problem of identification: when was an expatriate poet so expatriate as to cease to be a New Zealand poet?

One of the major tests for cultural nationalism's construction of its own pre-history was the turn-of-the-century phenomenon of literary expatriatism to Australia. The issue was of moment because the Sydney Bulletin, to which many New Zealand poets were attracted, was itself the source, in the 1890s and after, of Australian cultural nationalism. The question often asked, ‘Was there a Bulletin school of New Zealand poetry?’, entailed a more fundamental question, ‘Did New Zealand's cultural nationalism begin much earlier than the 1930s (at least a generation earlier, in fact), and was it in fact not “internally generated” but simply an Australian export?’ The orthodox answer, that New Zealand contributors to the Bulletin belonged largely to a genteel colonial poetic tradition in decay, needs considerable modification. The Bulletin published a huge amount of New Zealand verse between the later 1890s and 1960—more than 4,000 items according to a recent estimate—and it was a major outlet for at least a dozen New Zealand poets, three of whom—A. H. Adams, David McKee Wright and Douglas Stewart—were in fact literary editors of the magazine for more than half the period to 1960.

A considerable number of these and other early twentieth-century poets, most of them New Zealand-born and struggling to survive by making professional careers as journalists, are best seen as transitional figures, striving to articulate questions about nation and location a generation before the fully-fledged cultural nationalism of the 1930s and 1940s. Some, like Will Lawson and McKee Wright, attempted a local balladry; Jessie Mackay and Constance Clyde were influenced by the turn-of-the-century women's movement; Adams and Frank Morton attempted a more urban-based poetry, influenced by Decadent and early modernist models in England and Europe. All, in different ways, sought to question the puritanism, materialism and conformism of the new society which was emerging in the wake of colonialism. At its best the poetry also began to draw on the new variety of English that began to be noticed (and deplored by Anglophile educationists) from the 1890s onwards. Blanche Baughan's ‘A Bush Section’ offered a paradigm of this shift occurring in the language of New Zealand poetry.

In the later twentieth century the increasing mobility of writers across national boundaries remains a phenomenon generating unresolved postcolonial problems of identity, location, and the interpretation of texts. Douglas Stewart disappeared from New Zealand anthologies after the 1950s, as did William Hart-Smith, another distinguished Bulletin contributor. The editors of the 1985 Penguin anthology excluded Hart-Smith and a number of younger New Zealand expatriate poets in Australia (‘with regret’), as well as the established poets Peter Bland (living in England) and Charles Doyle (living in Canada). However, they included Alan Brunton, Fleur Adcock and Kevin Ireland because of ‘their continued connection’ and because they drew ‘sustenance from location’ (Wedde and McQueen, 1985, p. 45). Quite what principles underlay these differentiations is unclear.

THE NATIONALIST CANON, 1920-1960

The canon which Allen Curnow established in the 1960 Penguin anthology, if one were to list the poets who received selections of ten or more pages, consisted of nine poets, eight male and one female, all of whom belonged to the near side of his ‘historical divide’, the decades between 1920 and 1960. They were Ursula Bethell, A. R. D. Fairburn, R. A. K. Mason, Charles Brasch, Curnow himself, Denis Glover, Keith Sinclair, Kendrick Smithyman and James K. Baxter. Women fared better if the grouping were extended to include a further six poets given six or eight pages: Blanche Baughan (the only poet from the far side of the historical divide), Robin Hyde and Gloria Rawlinson, alongside D'Arcy Cresswell, Charles Spear and C. K. Stead. Eileen Duggan, whose work Curnow wished to include, refused permission. With the exception of Cresswell, and a more generous evaluation by others of a number of 1950s poets—Alistair Campbell, M. K. Joseph and Louis Johnson—these assessments were very largely confirmed, for the period up to the 1950s, in the anthologies which appeared after 1960. Curnow's singling out of Kendrick Smithyman and C. K. Stead in addition to Baxter, among the newer post-Second World War poets, was also strikingly confirmed by their later development. In the later anthologies there has also been a general consensus about the new figures to be added to the ‘canon’ in the decades following: from the 1960s, Hone Tuwhare, Fleur Adcock and Vincent O'Sullivan, and from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, Ian Wedde, Bill Manhire, Lauris Edmond and Elizabeth Smither.

League tables are one thing, of course, but how the poets are discussed by powerful anthologists is another, and often a great deal of cultural debate is generated around the edges of the main figures: in the weightings given to lesser figures and in the nature of the selections made from the more substantial figures. Much of the initial controversy which greeted Curnow's 1960 Penguin centred on its sparse selection of 1950s poets (the so-called ‘Baxter generation’), and Baxter himself produced numerous anti-nationalist counter-readings of poets whom Curnow had under-represented, readings which spoke as eloquently of his own mytho-poetic and psychological interests as Curnow's readings reflected his own investment in cultural nationalist adaptations of modernist principles.

Curnow's subtle readings of his canonical poets recognized individual distinctions of tone, technique and thematic emphasis, but carefully assembled generalizations around a number of key formalist and modernist terms of approbation: ‘tension’ and ambivalence of attitude, a critical slant on colonial history and its still-active traces in contemporary society, a carefully wrought metaphoric or symbolic response to landscape (beyond colonial scenic pictorialism), complexity of language. All of these qualities functioned as markers of, as he put it in his discussion of Mansfield's ‘To Stanislaw Wyspianski’, ‘the emergence of New Zealand as a characterizing emotional force in the work of a native poet’, a sign of the inward engagement of ‘the whole personality’ in the problems of being a poet in New Zealand. Although the language of post-colonial theory was not available to Curnow, his emphasis on inward, unresolved tensions fits closely Stephen Slemon's argument that ‘ambivalence of emplacement’—outside the ‘illusion of a stable self/other, here/there binary division’—is ‘the “always already” condition of Second-World settler and post-colonial literary writing’, the source of its particular importance within the field of postcolonial analysis: ‘[In] the white literatures of Australia, or New Zealand, or Canada, or southern Africa, anti-colonialist resistance has never been directed at an object or a discursive structure which can be seen as purely external to the self’ (Slemon, 1996, p. 80).

It was nevertheless the case that some poets, and some poems, fitted the terms of cultural nationalism better than others. Fairburn, Glover, Brasch and Bethell—later, Baxter and Smithyman (but only in some of their poems)—lent themselves to the charting of a sophisticated iconography of New Zealand landscape, including its regional differences, which at the same time respected the varieties of preoccupation explored through their landscape meditations: Fairburn's love poetry and poetry of social comment; Glover's interest in the kiwi ‘common man’ explored though his lone ‘Harry’ and ‘Arawata Bill’ personae; Brasch's sense of alienation from landscape and history, and the same concern (though more personally focused) in some of Baxter's poetry; Bethell's religious meditations, grounded in the Canterbury landscape; and Smithyman's use of Northland landscapes to explore epistemological issues. However, poetry and poems whose personal, domestic or psychological interests could not be immediately anchored in an identifiable landscape or history, tended to move out of focus. A great deal of women's poetry fell into this category, as well as significant work by Baxter, Louis Johnson, Alistair Campbell and M. K. Joseph. Similarly, R. A. K. Mason's intense psychological questionings of sexuality and relationships, and his agnostic probings of religious belief, were downplayed in their own terms in order to reinforce the notion of an ‘essential’ New Zealand isolation as the formative, originary condition of his poetry (and thus an appropriate starting point for the nationalist tradition); Mason's emergent commitment to Marxism in the late 1920s, ambivalent though its relationship was to his development as a poet, was also largely ignored.

In his introduction to the 1985 Penguin anthology Wedde drew attention to the possibility of alternative, gender-inflected readings of the nationalist canon, proposing a ‘structural line’ of women's poetry, from Baughan, through Bethell, Duggan, Hyde and Rawlinson, as ‘one of the great strengths’ of New Zealand poetry. He identified this strength—somewhat vaguely—as an ‘upwelling vigour of original language’ and as ‘a code of alert irony’ (including here, as well, the later poets, Janet Frame, Fleur Adcock and Elizabeth Smither) in contradistinction to the ‘celebrated humour’ of the male poets. (Wedde and McQueen, 1985, p. 36). A more vigorously gender-inflected reading of New Zealand poetry, underpinned by a sustained polemic against Curnow's earlier readings and strongly focused on defining an alternative female poetics and its cultural implications, was advanced a decade later by Michele Leggott, herself an experimental poet exploring much of the territory identified in her reading of women poets in New Zealand. Focusing on Hyde and Duggan, Leggott placed them within ‘a lost matrix of women poets’, including Jessie Mackay (and Baughan and Bethell), who ‘shaped New Zealand poetry in the first half of the century as a politically alert, humanitarian enterprise, diverse in its subjects and styles but run on sympathetic and highly reticulated energies that took as their point of departure the socially progressive atmosphere of the late colonial period’. Leggott's feminist reading thus also worked to break down the notion of a ‘historical divide’ located in the 1920s: the concerns of this matrix of women poets were rooted in the ‘hope of cultural continuity’ and ‘the complications of endurance’, rather than the ‘carefully anatomized alienation of the male poets’. Her reading of Hyde and Duggan draws continuing attention to ‘metamorphic, control-eluding figures’ in their work, to coded representations of female experience (especially, female sexuality) in a culture that ‘refused all talk of the body’ (Leggott, 1995, pp. 267ff.).

THE 1960S AND AFTER

By the mid-1960s poetry itself was also moving in significantly different directions. One of these directions was a movement among the older poets to break out of fixed forms, to develop a more personal mode of expression which drew flexibly from a variety of formal and informal speech registers and explored a wide range of personal, domestic and social concerns in a style which exploited shifts and contrasts of tone, mood and emotional intensity. Its immediate model was the confessional poetry of Americans like Robert Lowell, but it had distinguished New Zealand precursors in Robin Hyde's sequence, ‘Houses by the Sea’, and in Mary Stanley's slim output in the 1950s. Apart from Baxter its most skilled exponents in the 1960s were Fleur Adcock, Peter Bland and Louis Johnson, and variations of it were later to appear in the substantial oeuvres of Vincent O'Sullivan, Kevin Ireland, Brian Turner, Lauris Edmond and Anne French. By the early 1980s it seemed so ubiquitous a mode among a host of minor poets that Roger Horrocks could caricature it as a form of local mass-production and draw attention to the irony that its ‘studied spontaneity’, based on the notion that ‘poetry is an exemplary defence of individuality’, had itself hardened into a set of predictable conventions. (Horrocks, 1985, pp. 101-2). Nevertheless it has remained a significant form in New Zealand, especially among women poets—perhaps because of the special claims it makes for the authenticity of personal experience.

The other major shift in the mid-1960s was an explosion of writing by a new generation, mainly students, youthful, iconoclastic, involved variously in the counter-culture of political protest, drugs and rock music. They were deeply suspicious of authority in any form (including the literary—cultural establishment and its privileged voices), hostile to High Culture (especially its Anglo-European exemplars and icons), but receptive to the wide variety of new energies emerging in the United States (Donald M. Allen's anthology, The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, was widely read and influential), and to the language and iconography of popular culture. The practice of the many poets whose work began to appear at this time, in student magazines (including Freed, the best known, which appeared from Auckland in five issues between 1969 and 1972) and in new small presses, varied widely, and—as elsewhere—such labels as ‘open form’ and ‘postmodern’ soon began to be applied to it. As a group they were more readily identifiable by what they opposed than by what, collectively, they might ‘stand for’, and indeed were resistant to the practice of attaching labels to traditions and trends. What proved most durable—in the work of those who went on to produce substantial bodies of work and in turn influence younger poets (Wedde, Bill Manhire, Alan Brunton, Alan Loney, Murray Edmond)—was the nature of their attention to language and to the authority of the poetic voice. Behind the often exuberant display of verbal and typographical virtuosity lay a deep scepticism about the capacity of language to represent any special truth thought to be accessible to the authority of the poetic voice, and a celebration instead of the contingency of language, its strategic possibilities for hugely more various, allusive and performative deployment on the page—ranging from the fragment to the most elaborate patterning—as well as in spoken performance.

Such a poetics, with its postmodern tendency to abolish the distinction between surface and depth, lay at the opposite pole to the poetics of the personal poem, which retains a kind of epistemological faith in the continuity of ‘mind’, ‘self’, ‘language’ and ‘the world’, despite the often elaborate casualness and indirection of the movement of the poem's thought and language. However, Wedde's key terms and strategies of selection, later, for the 1985 Penguin, belonged less to the poetics of either postmodernism or the personal poem than to the new critical discourse of postcolonialism: language, location and the ongoing processes of cultural exchange and translation, both within the country and in its outward global relations. Despite his emphasis on these questions, he did not entirely avoid the teleological, prescriptive cast of the older nationalism, and in this sense shared the latter's ambivalence.

Whereas the earlier model was modernist-derived, Wedde suggestively adapted a model invented by the Canadian critic, Northrop Frye, premised on a distinction between ‘hieratic’ and ‘demotic’ modes of writing. Wedde emphasized the linguistic and cultural implications of the model: ‘Hieratic describes language that is received, self-referential, encoded elect, with a “high” social threshold emphasizing cultural and historical continuity. … [Whereas] “demotic” describes language with a spoken base, adaptable and exploratory codes, and a “lower” and more inclusive social threshold emphasizing cultural mobility and immediacy’ (Wedde and McQueen, 1985, p. 25). Although he strives to avoid applying the terms normatively to New Zealand poetry, they do in fact often function that way, producing a narrative of the progressive development of poetry in English from the (implicitly colonialist) hieratic to the (implicitly postcolonial) demotic. The nationalist period (1920s-1950s) becomes, in this progression, a deeply ambivalent, ‘transitional’ period, compromised by its backward-looking colonialist/hieratic affiliations to High Culture (the province, always, of ‘some distantly-located spring’) in the practice of figures like Brasch, but at other times (in some of the work of Glover, Baxter and the women poets, drawing on other elements in modernism) marking the beginnings of the ‘growth of the language into its location’, and looking forward to ‘the consummation of a sense of relation’ (ibid., pp. 23, 26) apparent, diversely, in poetry from the 1960s onwards. Wedde's argument is itself deeply ambivalent in this respect, locked into a binary opposition of alienation/relation which elides, or leaves unresolved, the key issue, for postcolonial analysis, of settler/indigenous power relations. An ‘ease’ of relation to location, if that is indeed what post-sixties New Zealand poetry in English reflects, might simply suggest that the cultural colonization of the country has been, at last, achieved.

Wedde's emphasis on the inescapably linguistic character of the cultural issues he addressed was nevertheless both highly original and deeply suggestive as a way of reading New Zealand poetry, especially poetry written after the 1960s. A highly significant development in the poetry itself was the emergence of language as a driving preoccupation in the work of many poets. In no other respect, it might be argued, has poetry in New Zealand (in English and in Maori) signalled more strongly its participation in the international discourse of postcolonialism. Among the older poets, Curnow, Smithyman and Stead moved increasingly self-consciously into the epistemological issues raised by the transactions between language and location. The focus of Manhire, Wedde, Brunton, Leggott and others was less self-conscious, more celebratory, but every poem they wrote exhibits an implicit knowingness about language as offering a rich repertoire of strategic possibilities for cultural interventions. Tuwhare's poetry increasingly shared the same impulse. Other poets, like Alan Loney and Graham Lindsay, wrote with a more deliberate sense of the instrumental possibilities of language. The line of women's poetry extending from Elizabeth Smither in the mid-1970s to—after the mid-1980s—Leggott, Dinah Hawken, Anne French and Jenny Bornholdt carried the same kinds of linguistic sophistication, and in many of their poems they explored and exploited, as well, the gendered nature of language.

Manhire, the major poetic voice of his generation, and highly influential as a creative writing teacher and mentor of many emerging poets of the 1980s and 1990s, is also notable as a critic for his foregrounding of issues of language. ‘A whole range of contemporary New Zealand poetry’, he argues, is characterized by the linguistic habit of ‘code-switching’—the deployment of multiple voices, multiple registers, producing texts ‘crammed with voices, locations, and perspectives’, in order to break down, move beyond, ‘the control of a single homogenizing voice … the achieved, inviolable voice of the poet’ (Manhire, 1991, pp. 149, 151-2). The distinction he makes between ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ language is related to Wedde's distinction between the hieratic and the demotic. Some of Manhire's examples of ‘impurity’—Glover's ‘The Magpies’ and Curnow's ‘House and Land’—survive from the earlier modernist-nationalist period, and he draws attention to key shifts in a poet like Baxter, who ‘begins as the elevated poet of a single voice, but becomes a far more interesting poet when he opens his work—in Pig Island Letters and the Jerusalem poems—to a range of tones and registers’, as well as to Curnow's development into ‘the master of code-switching in our writing’ (ibid., p. 152). However, most of his examples are drawn from the 1970s and after: Tuwhare in particular, but also Smither, O'Sullivan and his own work.

There is always a temptation to invoke undifferentiated notions of diversity or plurality when confronted by the sheer plethora of generations, styles, individual voices and languages, which seemed to characterize New Zealand poetry in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Such notions, however, tend to ignore or downplay the ‘disputed ground’ which remains central to the energies of poetry. The sites of contestation are many and various, and in that sense different from the older single-issue literary politics of cultural nationalism. Furthermore, every site has its own complex cultural dynamics, whether the issues are generational, gender- or ethnicity-focused, locational (a refiguring of notions of the national or regional, revisions of the canon), or global (new international configurations of power and influence). Fortunately, there seems little prospect of a diminution in the vigour with which poetry, and poetics, engage with these key postcolonial issues.

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