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New Zealand: news from paradise

A statisticians’ paradise with some of the most healthy, educated, environmentally minded and progressive people in the world, New Zealand is often thought boring, uninteresting, small-townish. I spent four years hating it after the excitement I was used to in Nigeria and Paris. Where were the civil wars, African music and dance, unexpected foreign visitors, filthy markets, streets of prostitutes, celebrities, fashions? The soul and body need the sublime, highs, thrills, anxieties, fears, threats of falling off the edge. It is not that New Zealand lacks danger, but that it is not part of its cultural expression. Only the destruction of Christchurch by earthquakes made a friend seem alive; for once he had a theme for his emails beyond complaints of boredom, mistreatment, even his uninteresting adultery for which he was apologetic. Kevin Ireland should be the national poet of New Zealand. For over 50 years he has been writing good, solid, minimalist verse in which too often little happens beyond the celebration of a nice day, the coming of a poem, love for some woman, or opinions shared with another poet about the state of the nation. The poems are traditional, well formed, varied in movement and rhyme, models of versification, but they seem oldfashioned and lack the emotions, risk-taking and surprise of great poetry or interesting bad poetry. Many would pass unnoticed in an anthology of the best poems of the year. Ireland deserves more attention than he has so far had abroad, and I much prefer him to the “it is always raining and I am living at the distant the edge of the world” groans of some better-known New Zealand poets, but his verse is domesticated, undemanding. Although there are generalized warnings of evil, such as tyrants, the only detailed violence is in a poem about filleting a fish.