The poetry of Mike Beveridge, a critical review

 Generosity, Intelligence and Love in the Poetry of Mike Beveridge

An obituary in The Post newspaper on Tuesday 13 July 2023 informs us that “Mike Beveridge died at 3 pm yesterday. He chose the time. He chose the place.” Among scholars, Beveridge is best remembered for Conversation with Frank Sargeson: an interview with Michael Beveridge (published in Landfall 24 while he was a post-graduate student at the University of Canterbury and which is still required reading for students of New Zealand literature at university level), for a series of short stories in Islands and Landfall during the 1970s and 80s and for having been the 1989 Grimshaw Sargeson fellow. To most residents of Nelson, however, he was indelibly associated with Everyman, a second-hand book and record store that he founded with a partner in 1975, the fame of which spread throughout New Zealand and even worldwide over the forty-or-so years of its existence. Even so, the rougher and readier coevals of the café-dwellers who read Landfall and frequented Everyman would better remember the rugged flanker who played premier-level rugby for the Nelson Bays representative team during the early- to mid-1970s.

But in spite the diversity of his pursuits and having chosen to die on his own terms, Mike Beveridge’s life would probably not have merited a full-page article in the national press had it not been for the fact that soon after being diagnosed with an inoperable oesophagus tumour, he published a book of poems that – in the publisher’s words –  “return us to a time when poems had rhyme and rhythm”. Poems for Remembering (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2022), however, does more than that; it reminds us of the kind of poetry that, while firmly rooted in the contemporary reality of New Zealand-Aotearoa, was once written by Yeats, Auden, Robert Frost or Philip Larkin. The collection is prefaced, in fact, by a statement of intent in the form of an observation by the latter in an interview in The Paris Review: Probably my notion of poetry is very simple. Some time ago I agreed to help judge a poetry competition – you know, the kind where they get about 35,000 entries, and you look at the best few thousand. After a bit I said, Where are all the love poems? And nature poems? And they said, Oh, we threw all those away.
I expect they were the ones I should have liked.

Accordingly, poems about love (the flames, embers, ashes, revival and perseverance of romantic, sexual, brotherly, convivial or platonic love), and those  that take the physical setting of New Zealand and observation of its inhabitants – human and otherwise – as their metier, make up the majority of the collection. Where they part company with other contemporary verse, however, is not in the subject matter as much as in the formal embodiment through which Beveridge articulates meaning; as the publisher’s blurb points out, this is formal poetry that makes use of traditional poetic resources such as rhyme, metre, ellipsis, juxtaposition, alliteration and of forms such as the sonnet (almost a quarter of the poems are sonnets of one kind or another) and other classical structures used in surprising and innovative ways. In Alexandrine Waltz, for example, he combines  reflections on the approach of death, the power of dance and music and the persistence of love a deux over time, written entirely in alexandrine measure. That, however, does not mean that he writes for a highly literary – as opposed to literate – audience:

Oh Davey, my Davey, we’ve danced through a lifetime;

You’ve led and I’ve followed till it feels like we’re one.

Just some slow steps to start, then we’re back in our prime,

And what must finish soon now has barely begun.

The alexandrine imposes its mimesis of waltz tempo – the three stressed syllables in 3/4 time before and three more after the syntactic pause in the middle of each line underscore the theme. But to enjoy the verse and assimilate the full force of the story that it enables us to glimpse, readers do not need to know how the effect is accomplished or, needless to say, the names given by scholars to the devices used to achieve it. The poems are immediately accessible to the attentive reader and are thus both street-wise and high-brow at the same time; the diction ensures that their meaning is readily available at the narrative level while they provide an extra tier of satisfaction for the more erudite poetry-lover (who will know, for example, that the alexandrine was the metre favoured by the troubadours  in the medieval French chansons de geste and is thus concordant with the musical theme of the poem). The tricks of the trade are unobtrusively deployed to work their magic – art – on our ear, mind and emotions: not only do they not encumber the flow of the verse; they make it possible, and therefore constitute its essence. The very first poem in the collection – one of the shortest and apparently most simple – constitutes a good example of this consonance of form and content:

Leonard Cohen
Like none before, he learned to score
A poem deep inside a song,
And what he knew of love and hate
He made sound true to all who heard.
He braved what he could not ignore -
Love matters most, but can’t stay long:
Be generous, when time seals fate;
Goodbye ought be just love’s last word.

 

Poetic forms are simple devices compared to life, which is why they are so useful for dealing with the essentially amorphous, protean nature of the raw material. For the poem to work, however, the form must serve an over-arching purpose. Here, the fact that the lines rhyme at all does not become evident until the fifth echoes the first, from which point the arrangement (ABCDx2) demands a hesitant perusal while we backtrack to establish the pattern and – to the extent that reading is also a creative act – our deliberation ensures that the insight conveyed by the last couplet (that when love leaves, its duration is not automatically transmuted into wasted time) is appropriately underlined. This same generosity on parting is the theme of two other poems:

We had no notion how to stop the rot
But I knew, before our final parting,
You were my whole life’s one big win. I’d not
Have missed my time with you for anything

(That small Ralph Hotere) and

Try this, my Zed. Join me in feeling glad
We each got chosen, sent each other high:
I thought you swell, and wished that I could stay

         (Zoe).

Recalled with generosity, the lived experience becomes part of who we are and may even leave us a little wiser. Sexual passion in Beveridge’s poetry is the occasion for endless joy and fascination, from the first tentative discovery of young love in Never Again: “First glance. First smile. First touch. First sigh. First kiss. / So swift we knew each atom in us changed…” or the second sonnet of First Love: Four Sonnets:  “We inched together, lay so still – so still. / A pilfered blanket, heat, insistent will…” through the joys of mutual desire in Bodysurfing, Winter: “Under a mountain of goosedown naked / My honey babe (Cherie) guides me inside…” to endings that run the gamut from generous (as above) through devastating (as in Long Story Short) to insouciant (Up North) or ironic (Twice Shy), not to mention poignant regret (Nelson Girl: “She dances on, clear out of reach / Her face aglow with love”) or, quite simply, heartbreak:

         Your red bus grumbles on its starting spot;

You step straight up without a backward glance

Just as you must: and right then I am cut

In two – (First Love, Sonnet IV)

But sensual or romantic love is only one of the emotional registers that shelter under the umbrella of that four-letter word. An equally important theme is the love that remains when desire wanes, as in Alexandrine Waltz; love as shared humanity, companionship or animal warmth under the shadow of approaching death is a theme that Beveridge explores insistently, for example in the beautiful Stuff They Don’t Tell You:

No other treasure could compare to this,

Forged in the quiet falling of Time’s sands;

It binds us through each evening’s last chaste kiss,

And keeps us close, as we sleep, holding hands.

        

Or in Yes, a Petrarchan sonnet that describes – in the octet – a young couple in the prime of life, “mad about each other”, in the garden with their rosy-cheeked children, when…

         I saw then vile Time come stealing, stealing,

Stealing her fine complexion, his dark hair,

Turning over life’s last cards, revealing

Illness and misery past all repair.

This, then, the end of human happiness:

If it’s with you, I’ll take it – I say, yes.

This too is generosity: thus the very first poem in the book foreshadows an ethos that informs the entire collection. We find it again in poems about the land and its people, both of which feature in Farmer:

I think you never envied anyone,                

But found or made yourself a life just right.  

You worked your Moeawatea block,             

Then bought another: twice the fun you said -       

And meant it! All those victories you won     

On land both rugged and remote were bright         

Adventures, challenges that kept you locked 

In gleeful battles – and with more ahead.     

         […]

So - “Poetry,” you said, “I just can’t see

The point at all.” That hit me where I live.

Half true too: no verse can slice a hillside,

Nor make a river turn another way -

        Nor bring you back, though crafted carefully.

        

The farmer leaps off the page with the force of a personality created in the round by a few seemingly casual anecdotes and a wealth of sensory detail –battling “bushfires and floods, stock lost, and crops undone” couched in imagery both original and evocative (“slapping your dozer like a mad cowpoke”) and interesting enjambments (“All those victories you won / On land both rugged and remote were bright / Adventures, challenges that kept you locked / In gleeful battles”). The cafe-dwelling narrator confesses that he “liked most your wit, your strafing scan / Of subjects quite certain to enable / Your irreverence – you dry old bugger.” The portrait, accomplished as it is, is not gratuitous, not painted for its own sake but as a vehicle for another poetic notion; the classical idea that art has the power to confer immortality of a kind: we would settle for poetry if we could give the farmer “shape, and voice, speak like you hadn’t died, / Help keep you in our hearts for one more day”, all of which Mike Beveridge – or his “arty-farty pink and green tree-hugger” alter ego – have just done. There he is. And there too are the blooms in Flower Power:

         For us, they body forth love, sorrow, peace;

They share our path, from infant room to hearse:

No subject chosen more in man’s long lease

To celebrate, in painting, and in verse -       

and in the heroine of Fool for You, drawn with a sudden, Dickinsonian tonal and rhythmic leap from a Renaissance-like decorum to the colloquial:

Defining and refining beauty’s face;

The perfect perfumed bloom tucked in your hair

Sweet partner to your loveliness and grace.

I’m half articulate, and two parts clown,

But I can tell truth when I write it down -

or in the wish, already granted, in Three NZ Painters:

To have one talent, and to fly it high:

But more, to give your whole life to fulfil

A dream so worthy that you must submit -

To catch and frame this land that we all love

or in the recipient of A Gift:

         And should my words please, let them linger on,

All for your love, my love, after we’re gone.

And, last but not least, there is Miss Jones:

         All life is fleeting - guess who taught me so? -

While poems are forever – hence it’s clear,

If I have reached you, reader, then you’ll know

That you, and I, and Miss Jones are all here.

But not all the poems that take the physical setting of New Zealand and observation of its inhabitants as their metier are vehicles for allusions to the poetic tradition. Too Good, for example, simply (if anything is simple in Beveridge’s poetic world) celebrates the sheer joy of living here and now, in this place, at this time:

         I drop my small back-pack, I shuck my shorts,

I honeypot down till the bottom’s near,

Then switch to breaststroke – swimming is my sport -

Defeat the current, pierce the water clear.

Now on the surface I sprint upstream hard;

The churning water thrills me, top to toe;

I dig it in, do fifteen extra yards,

Then flip, and float to where my gear is stowed.     

In Rock Pool, observing the marine life trapped at low tide “clinging on / Or hiding, while their whole environment / Is baked, squeezed, smashed by brutal elements”  gives rise to an entirely personal reflection on belonging to a place:

Should I awake cast high on unknown sand,

Or find myself one day lost out at sea,

I could not but spend all my energy

Until my feet were back on my home land.

Maitai Valley, Nelson is a descriptive narrative with no other pretension than to delight the reader with its imagery and intensely local details, and in Saturday Morning Market the poet paints a vivid picture of an exuberant fairground with a wealth of local detail to convey the amicable, appreciative social intercourse presented as something uniquely Kiwi:

         Crowds drift down grassed or gravelled walkways -                                                                      

Some stop. Groups form: neighbours, family, friends.

Good cheer is in the air: laughter ascends;

A newcomer shouts out some hearty phrase.

Commerce itself looks playful; makeshift stalls

And small old caravans are mostly manned

By locals some way clever with their hands -

All far away from bland beige shopping malls.

         […]

But we’re seduced again – we don’t fight hard -

By foods evoking our identity,

And happiness, and memories. So we

Edge past the hang pit, pay due regard

To sweet rewena bread and Nana’s Cakes

(Big Eccles! Yes!) but lay our money down

For whitebait fritters, peppered, halfway drowned

In lemon juice. One bite is all it takes -

          

But even here, the final couplet identifies the scene with the poem itself (and note the alliteration):

But some slight slump in spirit rests the case -

As though our singing senses could have lied -

All troubles tempered since we stepped inside

This vibrant portrait of our time and place.

We cannot but be aware of the constant activity of an acute intelligence and comprehensive knowledge of the tradition in which it is working. In this case, it is employed mischievously to show and tell; to show us a vivid Thackerayan canvas, and to tell us that we have just picked our way through a  “vibrant portrait of our time and place” made of… words. It is evident everywhere in the strategic creation of personae to deploy irony and humour, from the jilted rock-and-roll jive king in The Beat through the concupiscent beach-walker (“both arches fallen”) in On Takapuna Sands to the narrator of Bill Matthews or the jaunty self-directed humour of Kiwi Goodbye:

I’ve lived too long. My hair’s all gone,

My teeth and knees are shot to bits;

My spine’s set permanently wrong -

Right soon I’ll have to call it quits.

No wuzzas though, I’ve had a ball,

Sex, rock and roll, and drugs galore,

You at my side – that above all -

Be rude as fuck to ask for more.

But with so many and varied personae, where is the author? Perhaps in certain poems that express an undisguised tenderness, like From Dad, Always:

 But I will be there for you – till I’m not.                

My precious boy, soon now you’ll be the one 

To share kind lies I’ve told you, half-forgot,           

And smooth truth’s edges for your little son.          

Still, tell him that you heard your father say -        

Take all the joy you can, along the way.

or the narrator in A Gift:

But my gift is your gift: what you gave me

Lacked so in limits or hoops to crawl through

That my buried best instincts all stood free

To speak in your honour, as here they do.

Perhaps, however, it would as well to heed James Joyce’s oft-cited admonition: the author “remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork…” He cannot be identified with any one persona or voice but only with the overall imprint of a collection that conveys intelligence, generosity and love; love for Bill Matthews and his three cronies (who include the narrator) with all their naïve, unfashionable insularity; for the farmer, for the infant and his great-grandfather in Little Ira, for the couple holding hands in bed when time has stolen all else (Stuff They Don’t Tell You), for a swimming-hole in pristine river waters or a couple sauntering through a weekend produce market; generosity in the face of losing a first love through ineptitude or cowardice (Nelson Girl, …Four Sonnets) or when passion dies and lovers part, and intelligence in the various communicative strategies that underlie every one of these Poems for Remembering. They are the result of hard work, ambition, talent, and close observation - a genuine attempt to render some of what really matters to us as we pass through this world. Over the last half-century or so few, if any, books comparable in style, manner, content and intention have appeared on the New Zealand poetry scene. This volume announces the arrival of an authentic new poetic voice steeped in the great tradition and imbued with the reality of the people and landscape of New Zealand.

By way of conclusion – although I feel I have barely scratched the surface of what needs to be said about this collection – the back cover of the book announces that “A selection of these poems has been put to music […] and will be available shortly under the title Songs for Remembering”.

Because we were good friends, Beveridge had sent me a digital copy of the book’s proofs and it just happened that Jeff Espinoza, a singer-songwriter from Los Angeles now living in Madrid, Spain, also a friend of mine, was at my place soon after the proofs arrived. I read him some of the poems and he said “hey, one or two of those would  make great lyrics. I could put a couple  to music if you like” and, to cut a long story short, we ended up deciding to publish an album. The result, Songs for Remembering, is now available on You Tube and other well-known platforms (Apple Music, Deezer, Spotify, etc.). Espinoza  was able to turn these poems into songs of enduring beauty because they rhyme and scan perfectly. Intentionally or not, Beveridge is now aligned with his two great contemporaries in recovering the symbiosis between poetry and song that goes back beyond Ben Jonson’s “Song, to Celia” with its opening line that would not be out of place in this collection: “Come my Celia, let us prove, while we may, the sports of love.”