About the Book
A transtasman narrative poem encompassing personal family history combined with geographical/oceanographic and historical events. The title refers to the shipping trade between the colonies of Australia and New Zealand.
About the Author :
Stephen Oliver is the author of 17 volumes of poetry including APOCRYPHA a chapbook of poetry published by Cold Hub Press (2010).Travelled extensively. Signed on with the radio ship The Voice of Peace broadcasting in the Mediterranean out of Jaffa, Israel. Free-lanced in Australia/New Zealand as production voice, narrator, newsreader, radio producer, columnist, copy and feature writer, etc. Lived in Australia for the last two decades. Currently spending an extended sojourn in NZ. His latest volume, INTERCOLONIAL is a long narrative poem published by John Denny of Puriri Press (2013) and is as much about Australia as it is New Zealand; a transtasman narrative. Stephen Oliver's volumes of poetry include: Henwise (1975), & interviews (1978), Autumn Songs (1978), Letter To James K. Baxter (1980), Earthbound Mirrors (1984), Guardians, Not Angels (1993), Islands of Wilderness - A Romance (1996), Unmanned (1999), Election Year Blues (1999), Night of Warehouses: Poems 1978 - 2000 (2001), Deadly Pollen (2003), Ballads, Satire & Salt (2003), Either Side The Horizon (2005), Parable Of The Sea Sponge (2007), Harmonic (2008), Apocrypha (2010), and Intercolonial (2013).
Review :
"Intercolonial, fittingly, ranges wide--it's oceanic--transtasman, transatlantic--both impressively researched and visionary. McCormack, at its centre, may be 'Dionysius morphed into Cormac Mac Airt'--his dreamscape comprises the coming of the gods, the Romans, the Vikings, the Maori. Stephen Oliver gives us a Wellington as shape shifting through myth, history and childhood as any of McCormack's hauntings; set him at any of the way stations and we are caught in the swirl of seas, the changing landforms and cities, human doings, minds and stories. A compulsive read." - Judith Rodriquez (poet and editor, Melbourne). "Intercolonial is founded on a kind of psychic geography, a set of bravura descriptions which move from the geology of Wellington to the clash of the Pacific and Australian plates--and, further afield, the North Sea. As the title suggests, Oliver's identity has both Australian and New Zealand roots; this poem powerfully explores the ground of that identity in the dark realms of being, dream and the unconscious. The ambition is epic, the language driven, the structure balanced. Intercolonial reconfirms Oliver's status as perhaps our leading transtasman poet." - Nicholas Reid (sometime senior lecturer, University of Otago, Canberra). "A lyrical genealogy as lush as the terrains it inhabits, Intercolonial unburdens a tremendous hybrid swathe of Australian and New Zealand history. This complex and ambitious narrative poem is lovely, dire, caustic, and unsettled. Employing a multitude of voices, Oliver weaves an elliptical thread: from Kupe, arriving in New Zealand; to Solomon Blay, the notable executioner of Van Diemen's Land; to Thomas McCormack, Oliver's great grandfather. The poem is spectroscopic in that matter and light can only be located between terra, dreams, and the formidable lineage of flawed, hubris-laden human beings." - Nicole Sprague (poet, lecturer, University of Alaska, Fairbanks) "Oliver is doing something quite daring here. Something which justifies a claim that Intercolonial defines a new genre. Oliver creates an uncanny tension, layering independent strata of meaning, by use of place names alone. It is a strange journey. The reader encounters a slow, magical transformation of hard terrain, star-drift, river and rock. Of course, this kind of word-work needs more than just imagination. It needs nerve. The lines are sinuous and the mapping deft. The writing is pinpoint sharp, the images held as if in transparent amber." - Warren Dibble (playwright, poet, Burns Fellow, University of Otago 1969, Sydney). "... It is easy to recommend this volume. Diverse in its range of reference, arresting in its subject, the work is also carefully constructed. Oliver uses the fourline form with considerable dexterity. The result is a book that is conceived with sharp attention to detail, joy in language, and the seriousness and exhilaration of the enterprise." - Patricia Prime (Takahe Literary Magazine) "In 60 pages of loose, unrhymed quatrains, Stephen Oliver has created a poem ambitious in its reach and dizzying in its effect. Intercolonial is a personal epic, but being an epic it links the personal to the cosmic. In its diff erent sections Oliver traverses his own childhood in Wellington in the 1950s; the whole geological formation of Wellington and the shipwrecks on its coasts; the history of his great-grandfather Thomas McCormack who came from colonial Australia; the cruelty of old penal Van Diemen's Land and its hangman; the earliest of Maori navigation; and the deep Celtic background that takes in Viking raids upon the Irish coasts. Is this a loose congeries or grab-bag? No, because Oliver has the control to let us see that this huge history leads, as all history does, to the individual. By blood, inheritance, location and family legend, we all of us carry as capacious a history on our backs. The title Intercolonial underlines the strong links between 19th century Australia and New Zealand. The poet gives real weight to specific and telling features, whether he is noting that ancient streams still flow under solid Wellington suburbs or describing his great-grandfather's foundry in the heart of grim Calvinist old Dunedin. A short notice does not allow extensive quotation to prove the poet's skill, but there is much that is quotable, whether the conjunction of Lucifer with the 'Big Bang' or the charming vignette of dolphins butting through Wellington harbour: hear dolphin pods cog and hiss the harbour, / side-slap a wave, sonar click a herd of herring, sound an estuary, / ping-pong playfully off steel-plated hulls, mid-harbour. An expansive and affecting poem." - Nicholas Reid (Guest Editor, Poetry NZ)
