WW2 specialist reveals another voice

Vincent O'Sullivan reviews A Field Officer's Notebook: Selected Poems, by Dan Davin (ed Robert McLean). Published by Cold Hub Press.

Dan Davin is the name more than any other we associate with stories and novels about New  Zealanders serving in World War 2.

He also wrote a monumental history of those New Zealanders in Crete, and much later, the splendid Closing Times, his memoir of literary figures he knew well in London and Oxford. The bohemian was always there as the other side to the scholar and publisher.

Davin had no desire to become a published poet — knowing Dylan Thomas gave him a just assessment of his own limited gifts. Yet this first selection of the poems he did write is an important and welcome one, giving us an aspect of the man we knew little of until now. His comparatively few poems respond to intense and vivid occasions in his life, in a range of forms and moods — elegy, love lyrics, satire, ruminative lines of melancholy, brutal frankness, compassion. In a few fine instances, they bring a new note into New Zealand poetry. And yet again, we are indebted to Cold Hub Press for so handsomely producing a volume of the kind that our other publishers are unlikely to invest in, work with its own integrity and distinctive voice.

Robert McLean has mined the poems from Davin’s surviving papers, and a handful of published sources. He has provided too an admirable introduction, which explains how they fall into three categories. There are the early poems, many of them curiously morose for a brilliant and successful man still in his early twenties. A little later, the poems written under the pressure of war with a hard-eyed realism, and a deep compassion for war’s ‘collateral damage’, as we now call it. Two poems especially, are alert to what women endure as an army possesses a city. The third group are those of an ageing, disillusioned man, variously tender, regretful, bitter. Inevitably, the volume reflects Davin’s classical training, his nostalgia for the Southland of his early years, the styles of the period when they were written. They are misread, if we do not keep in mind the contexts they emerge from.

That is part of the challenge, as well as reward, of reading poems which are new to us, half a century and more after they were jotted down. Their spontaneity survives through the changes in language, and the altered perspectives, that now stand between them and us. What still so trenchantly comes through are the raw facts of war, love’s attempt to survive it, the refusal to share the traditions that attempt to console. There is a hard, implacable fatalism that concludes the volume, as the final poem, "Day’s End", goes back to childhood memories, to the imperatives of love, to as close as we come to explaining how and why things are as they are:

The hens are fed, the pigs are fed.
The cows are milked, and out for the night.  
So are the stars.  
The Building Society’s debts are paid.
We haven’t lost the land beneath us.  
The night is light,  
And so is the moon. 
And down by the gorse-flamed edges  
You and I lie prone to the sky 
And grow up at our edges. 
And that’s the way it was. 
That is the way it will always be, 
Because.

It’s hard to imagine a representative and humane New Zealand anthology of the future, that does not draw on Davin’s modest but singularly compelling poems.

- Vincent O’Sullivan is an award-winning poet, novelist, playwright, critic and editor.