Rob Allan

Rob Allan has retired from a career as a teacher of deaf children in Otago. In 1991 he published the prize-winning Karitane Postcards (Hazard Press), noting:

The poems are a sustained post-modern attempt to write a long poem with an epic scope.
The poem is living in the place of language to capture the 'real'. Karitane is the focus:
a mix of politics, poetics, pushed in and out of place by listening, reading, and talking about – the right words in the right place, for example.

This work has been widely anthologised. He collaborated with Jenny Powell Chalmers on the poem Showbiz, which was collected in Double Jointed (Inkweed Press, 2003). He is currently researching and writing the sustained work Harbour.

Karitane Postcards

1

For example       Andropov is dead. That was the news

caught in its announcement.

Another world dreaming out a persona life

it’s a personal world in successive moments.

I saw these features in the coast of Karitane

green dips of distance       a return to the old place

approximating the dream where I started

to desire       entreat       wish myself in the world.

       In New York City 30 cm. of snow fell today.

I pour myself more tea. I am reading Rivers and Mountains

by John Ashberry.

Mr. Leach is 93 years old and wishes to be remembered to me.

Some plants I know by smell and some by their

feel in my hands.

Sometimes I can taste them

at times like sunlight      all this going on forever.

2

If I catch myself staring at an object

I must decide what I will tell you.

Gertrude Stein struggled to get rid of the nouns

– the nouns had to go

I want history to go and politics and art

and images and symbols. I am looking at a plate

of shells named after Captain Cook

and I hear my boy sleeping in the bedroom

next door. I want description to go

I want the hoons revving up over the road to go

Captain Hook that’s what Richard calls him

and his breath is a small surf through the wall.

Karitane it breathes all around my body

and the stars of the visible universe

I want the past and future to go

and my single mindedness.

3

In the Book of Hours I found on the shelf

pressed flowers       selfheal       groundsell

speedwell       placed there some twenty years ago

by Betty Bell       to Betty it said in the fly leaf

with love from Bella       San Francisco  May 1953.

Such quietness there’s space to panic.

I like to hear my breath

its noise       the noise and heart’s clamour

of direction and purpose.

Truby organized the local residents to sand bag

the river so it didn’t flow again into old channels.

On wet nights he roused them

under God’s full glare       sandbagging the insolent

shadows.

4

We are sunk in history       drilled in it.

The seaweeds have names from war

seabombs       oysterthief

the earth is divided by the names we give

power’s genesis

I have dug in five nut trees

it’s a plan for peace and not being involved

in future wars.

Groundsel is a rapid growing plant of waste ground

and selfheal       a low growing plant

explains itself       simply living

as if I could       be pure and simple and good.

I know how life feels

it’s art’s disguise       it’s a handle on existence

and word’s ignorance

I come back to.

The Poet Follows the Janet Frame Heritage Trail with His Beloved and Her Daughter

I think we were getting to know each other

the trail

of signs along the streets.

It was Autumn or nearly Spring

the Spice Girls

were the most popular thing

and a deep feeling

wherever we were going

was nowhere very interesting

see here a gully

and a tree

this was the site of a house

a pear tree and a plum

over the rise of the hill

a motorway bringing us back

from the place we had come from.

A secret of the imagination

a place to entangle.

Something in the air the salty sea

the rich earth and froth and foldings.

Overpowering I would say

any personal intention.

Mainland

I remember men working in their gardens

they handled spades like precious objects

they drank tap water

with much affected smacking of their lips

a recipe for a long and happy life

a joke for the children.

Now my son leaves home

he is going to a party

he is not looking back

– enjoy yourself – I could have said

on the mainland.

The Poet Renunciates

Well that’s better as James Joyce said

now where was I

now what was I about to say

I stood up but I did not stand aside

I went first through the gates of paradise

I went last through the gates of hell

because good manners patronize

I was rebranded and considered new

I went first through the gates of hell

I forgot to say please and thankyou

How do you do pleased to meet you

and I survive

and I survive

though I aim to please

I stand up for what I believe

my aim is appreciated, a sign said so

I washed my cup and saucer

as the support person in the office

is not my mother like me she only works here

All that is clear

my aim is appreciated

I aim to please

I stand up and I do not stand aside

I enter first through the gates of paradise.

Dearest Country

To hold oneself in place

to count the cost, to be contained.

I look across the dearest country

hills harbor in a sun crossed thoroughfare

a sight more fair

of water, earth, and light and air.

I look out where the wax eyes count

the ready reckoned angles

of sunlight and ripening.

I rehearse the names of settlements,

the renamed hills,

and watch the fretting clouds

take care of distance and the familiar rain.

Keeping the World in Place

Keeping the world in place, and we believe

it is for us, this love: –  expedience,

vanity of intellect, beauty, propriety of friendship.

Of words themselves, as language turns the syntax: –

you see the humour in the situation;

the power in you allowed a trick or two.

Once my wife and child, climbing the steps of the white liner.

NO ENTRY. The smell I carry entirely personal.

A desire to retain the past; the word collection,

with meanings (no use gathering what might after all be

meaningless unless there is a predetermined shape

guiding an idea of unity or at least

a radical stance to indifference.) How can love fail,

words seep the no less real?

Finding a Way

Finding a way out of the old sectors,

the memorials, terrific collections and points of view.

I clutched at maps and guidebooks,

the fainter promises of me and you,

of the world always being there.

A series of increasingly complex tasks;

do you remember my ame?

I tumbled through history to belong here,

to sleep and dream again, out from the way back,

pushed by natural and human atrocity,

the cruel inconsequence of well known facts.

You couldn’t reach further or climb higher,

to get a decent view, already the gates close,

on riddles of trust and commitment.

News of Otago

Tuhawaiki drowned in the kelp beds

News of Otago slight but bad,

his monies paid as claimant

to the Otago Block, unaccountably missing.

A public calamity, the natives alienated.

These were the dark hours, but out of the sunny side,

brief messages of hope.

Cargill tenacious and Burns rigidly sublime;

they were figures in a dreaming landscape,

Otago whispered to them,

of a different truth:

a gateway on emptiness, a path

along unfamiliar routes.

Language is the Sea

You know I searched for you

language is the sea that unites us.

I saved your footprints from the frosty meadow.

I addressed a loving embrace,

to the present from the past.

No getting back feelings and beliefs.

Oneself as suspended

in dreams, in skin’s satiny imagings.

Love imbued and love mistaken –

what is life if not an enigma?

And all for love, the dreams of conquest.

And all for love, the dreams of freedom.

An open archaeology of the life.

The missed prompts, the muffed line, the mysterious.

Untitled

My own story, turning away from time

I turn within. You turn in silence

these tears, the refusals

denying the denials.

I read until I expressed myself

your expression, there is a landscape here

a history of trade, a history of war.

I found myself in the earth’s shape

in the horizon of the word, the word’s edge.

I match myself, I make myself sure.

I line up the familiars, I discover your indifference

I am made of the same store

we are joined by the waters of the ocean

infidelities of common sense. You are my signature.

Unique

A text lies fallen at Burns’ feet,

who sits in timeless thoroughfare:

words try to balace and express,

thoughts and feelings

grown out of place,

limber hopes of unwinding air.

Ascend the zodiac of future days,

waste not words that spoke outloud,

we walked processional to celebrate,

a world that served a common state;

wordfast images, of power’s filigree,

the leaf and branch and trunk set deep,

into the earth of the kingdom come,

imagined yet unknowable.