Still Is - takahē

Still Is by Vincent O’Sullivan. THWUP (2024). RRP: $30. PB, 122pp. ISBN: 9781776922093. Reviewed by Tim Grgec.

I never got a chance to read Vincent O’Sullivan at university. He lectured in the English department at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and was made an emeritus professor long before I arrived. I knew the name, of course. O’Sullivan the poet, novelist, and playwright. O’Sullivan the editor, biographer, reviewer, and anthologist. O’Sullivan the heavyweight of New Zealand literature. In my master’s year, I passed his black and white portrait every day on the 9th floor of the von Zedlitz building. His photograph was one of many that lined the tired corridors. He didn’t have glasses then, just the shaggy hair of a composer almost covering his eyes. His hands were in the pockets of his thick, black coat. He looked straight ahead. But what version of O’Sullivan was I staring at?

Sir Vincent O’Sullivan KNZSM died on 28 April 2024 in Dunedin. O’Sullivan was a towering presence in New Zealand literature and leaves behind a prolific body of work, including the posthumous poetry collection Still Is, published by THWUP in June. The book’s 92 new poems look back on a long life. There are reflections on childhood, adolescence, those who’ve come and gone, and the unreliability of such memories. There are poems about writing and why one would want to be a writer in the first place. The collection then builds towards a moving climax, contending with mortality and the influence, if any, that might continue after we’re gone.…

Despite the weight of such subjects, O’Sullivan treads lightly through the book’s 120 pages, always having fun with the reader. Many of these poems feel more like stories or good yarns. His speakers don’t mind having a laugh, underplaying any seriousness or sentimentally with a conversational wit and humour.

In the poem, “He so comes to mind, insistent as,” for example, O’Sullivan offers a glimpse into his writing process. He begins lyrically with a man in ‘knee-high grass’ walking ‘through an apple orchard / down to a pewter sliver of sea.’ At first, it feels like O’Sullivan commands total control of what’s on the page. But as the poem continues, the speaker’s imagination, and developing scene, takes on a life of its own. We learn of the unnamed man’s lonely life:

‘When he is back in the kitchen we share by this

time, with its smoked herrings and great blue

jug, and paintings of forebears who don’t go much

on what the present looks like, he breaks a loaf.

He has no wife and no housekeeper and the woman

who brings the bread to him once a week may welcome

advances, but nothing can be assumed, even

by those who are there because we place them there.’

Even though O’Sullivan ‘placed’ him there, we soon realise he has no way of knowing what his subject will do next. O’Sullivan sits in the Norwegian man’s kitchen like an unwelcome guest, observing him for material. Weeks pass before the man addresses the speaker directly, saying he’s tired of being ‘so under surveillance.’ Here O’Sullivan wryly suggests that it’s unfair for writers to invade their character’s lives like this, watching their every move. And still, he continues to intrude out of habit:

‘There must be some reason I sit as I do in his kitchen.

Should I ever have need to write it. Should he ever ask.’

It makes us wonder how many other imaginary kitchens O’Sullivan has sat in over such a long career, how many others have been under his ‘surveillance’? This is one of many poems in Still Is that makes fun of the relationship between writing and observation. You can hear O‘Sullivan chuckling as he questions who decides whether a story is worth telling. You’d think it would always be the writer, but, as the poem suggests, is it really their characters?

O’Sullivan scrutinises the writing process further in “Answers being out of the question,” exasperated at having to justify his work to an over-analytical reader. The reader asks O’Sullivan about why he had ‘blue tulips in a line of some importance, / when a brighter colour, surely, would have carried the day.’ Again, O’Sullivan is having fun with the reader and how we interpret his writing. “Answers being out of the question” is a conversation between poet and reader, but it could also be a conversation O’Sullivan is having with himself: O’Sullivan the practitioner and O’Sullivan the critic. Literary analysis often tries to make sense of why texts—poems, novels, and stories—are as they are, why certain decisions were made by the author, and to what effect. As for the blue tulips, O’Sullivan’s speaker confesses that ‘the colour was hanging about, / blue was loitering with intent before the line was thought of.’ There’s no clear reason why O’Sullivan chose the colour blue over another. The blue tulip presented itself so vividly he was compelled to use it, for, as the poem concludes, ‘there are times / even in verse / when choice isn’t the question.’

The final poem of Still Is, “You won’t mind my asking?”, proves the most overt in pushing back against literary analysis and the dangers of sucking the life out of writing. O’Sullivan implores his readers ‘not to look for the stories behind our stories, / or they’ll not be stories. Even less so, / poems.’ The collective ‘our’ speaks for all writers, in any form. Leave us to write and ‘do our job[s],’ O’Sullivan is saying, whether readers agree or not. For an accomplished writer and professor of literature, this feels like O’Sullivan the practitioner rising above the critic. Much of Still Is wavers between two ways of thinking: a writer compelled to follow artistic impulses and run away with his imagination, and a reader wanting to strap the work to the operating table to dissect every word.

At one point, O’Sullivan asks himself why he still ‘persist[s] at poems’ at his age. His reply? ‘Well, I’m better at it than bowls.’ And how thankful we are he persisted with Still Is. It’s an immensely enjoyable and clever collection from one of our country’s most esteemed literary figures. It’s the final say from O’Sullivan the poet, one of the greats in full flight, who appropriately, this last time, won’t let the critic pin him down.

Tim Grgec is a writer based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara—Wellington. His first book of poetry, All Tito’s Children, was published with Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2021.