Richard Reeve, Dialectic of Mud. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2001. RRP: $19.95.

Reviewed by TERRY LOCKE

In a recent article on Australian writer Tim Winton ("Necessary Savagery", NZ Listener, January 12, 2002), Bron Sibree refers to Winton's belief that life in Australia is influenced more by landscape than by culture. A similar belief might be attributed to Richard Reeve, a twenty-five-year-old Dunedin-based poet, whose first collection, Dialectic of Mud has recently been published by AUP. Reeve himself describe the impulse behind his poems as deriving "...from a more complete and even reverential acknowledgement of the encompassing world, which can come only after we have accepted our own finitude."

Certainly, the dark green cover which reproduces Jo Ogier's copperplate etching, Fiordland rain forest, establishes a tone for the book. The title poem, the last in the volume, offers a typical taste of what readers will find between its covers:

I am actual among the leaf. Singular and unavailing, I grip in the dry stack of my
      paws
grub-tongue, a fern's genital fist, the resonance and impunity of mud
     undifferentiated
save in the specimen of my understanding, the pubic grind of a stone, mossed
    kneecaps,

each such nominal stricture traducing the protean earth, carving supercilious steps
    into
what otherwise ever evades naming, is manifest yet never singularised in that
    hiatus
of human dogma except as despair, the One: the unsegmented, unenlightened
    whole.

Introducing verse like this to a senior class, I might mention that it's quite unlike anything you'll find previously published in New Zealand. (I might invite them to dip into Hart Crane's long poem The Bridge to look for similarities in language use.) But, it's not impenetrable, despite the demanding, even showy, vocabulary. In fact, it revolves around some of the big themes of literature: What is out relationship with the natural world? What does knowing mean? What do we do when we name things? Why do we name things? What is the effect of naming things? A consideration of such questions could provide a handy pre-reading activity.

Then you could look at the title of the poem: "Dialectic of mud". "Dialectic" and "mud" are both nouns, but beyond that they are a total contrast to one another. (You'll find mud in the natural world, but a dialectic is a human construct, for example.) That sets up a tension between them. And it's a tension that resonates in the sorts of contrasts and oppositions you can pick up even in this short segment of verse.

In case you've already made up your mind, on the basis of this taster, that Reeve is too bookish, I should point out that there are plenty of more "accessible" poems here. In section II, which focuses on natural creatures, there are a series of poems ("Spider", for example) which offer wonderful studies of human interaction with the natural world. And the third section has a series of poems with human subjects, of which "Alcoholic" would be a fine poem for senior students. It begins:

Night after night, it always ends the same.
I stumble through the door
Into the dawn, my ears full of the snore
Of empty streets, declaim
My masculinity to the coy stars.

I give Reeve a big tick for his wild and whirling words. If you're looking for a heady amalgam with echoes of Baxter, Crane, Ginsberg and Dylan Thomas, then this baby's for you.