poetic voice from

So good to hear a poetic voice from the Pacific

Mahanga, Pacific Poems, by

Vernice Wineera Pere. Pub

lished by Brigham Young

University Hawaii Campus

1978. SUSS.OO paper, $9.00 hard cover.

That part of the Pacific which lies between Australia and Hawaii is beginning to find its

indigenous voice in English

literature, with the work of the constellation of Maori writers and of Albert Wendt of Samoa.

Vernice Wineera Pere has an inheritance from Maori and Pakeha ancestors, and an edu cational link with both Aus tralia and Hawaii, where she took her degree and now lives.

She writes in English, the language which she has necess arily worked in, but the poems testify to an evident continuing strength of the Maori ingredi ent in her personal back ground, and to her respect and

even yearning for Maoritanga

and the land she was born in.

The title of the book, Mahanga, meaning twin, is her son’s name and that of his grandfather, but it stands also for her twin inheritance of the ways of two different worlds.

Her education allows her to use the myth of Icarus for the failure of the poet to express his vision, and her background draws her even more strongly to the ancient Maori myths, as she stands among the sul

phurous ghosts of Whaka

rewarewa’s hot springs. She can remember the tangled forests of old Ao-tea-roa, and look at New Zealand with the wry grin of an expatriate, see ing its present as ‘a tidy country,

manicured hourly by her

millions of sheep’. She is, in fact, the modern Pacific product, torn between what remains of the old life and the modern

day technological world she

has to live in.

She is most at home and most enlightening when she writes of her own immediate world, the islands and the sur rounding ocean. In the poem Big Surf the invasion of great

waves breaking over the lawns and flooding the houses of a new civilisation seems to hold a meaning for houses, not just beside the Pacific but around the world. And the grace she finds in her Island living, ‘born of the merge of man and the ocean\ might point toward a needed reconciliation between

humanity and the island-planet

itself. Poems like this, rising from the particular circum stances of Pacific living, widen the view beyond the horizons of the ocean.

There are not many poems in this collection of only 39 pages. That is easily accounted for Vernice Wineera Pere, like many women writers, leads a double life in yet another sense, being a teacher with seven children of her own. In evitably the poetry has to give way to more immediate needs, and some of the poems suffer from it. They are sometimes thin, domestically cir cumscribed, left in the rough.

The wonder probably is that they get through at all. But she has no intention of trying to play down the fact that the everyday and its events are what she has to deal with as material her reflections are sometimes over-simple, some times almost as banal as the road ‘tiled with flattened cans, round coins of bubble-gum, and pop-top tabs’ in The Boy Named Pita.

Among these emblems of civilisation the boy meets the sophisticated youths who are to initiate him into the violence and sexual emphases of the world imported into the Islands, which have been ex

ploited and changed by it as

Pita will be.

There must by now be a growing number of writers and potential writers in the lesser known Pacific, and a potential literature which has never been published for the good reason that very few publishers oper ate in that part of the world.

For a long time, the quite arbi

trary and damaging division of markets between English and American publishers drew a line through the Pacific in Australia it was as hard to buy American-published books as it was to buy books published by British and Australian pub lishers in the States. Though the division no longer exists, it is taking a long time to break down its lingering traces and there are still few voices to be heard from the Islands. It is good to have this one.

Wineera Pere writes from a milieu where ‘the clamor of a century’s importance’, as she puts it, has not yet taken away all the traces of an old life deeply related to the ocean; in it she feels herself acceptable in both worlds, yet somehow exiled in each. It is an experi ence which needs its own literature to express it. More work from the Pacific would help to provide an illumination of our own condition. Judith

Wright.