Alan Brunton: FQ

By PETER SIMPSON*

This scintillating, 144-poem sequence was the last work completed and readied for publication by Alan Brunton before his sudden death in Amsterdam this year.

To read it now is to be reminded sadly of what a major and extraordinary talent was truncated by his early death at 55. Nevertheless, Brunton achieved a remarkable amount in a career which extended over some 30 years.

He is probably best known as the creator in 1974 (with partner Sally Rodwell) of the legendary theatrical group Red Mole.

Brunton wrote and performed around 50 scripts in Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand, including Grooves of Glory, with which they were touring Europe when he died.

But Brunton was first and last a poet, author of a dozen volumes beginning with Messengers in Blackface in 1971, an achievement the scale of which is still recognised by only a few.

Probably his absence from New Zealand for a decade in mid career (1978-88) - mostly in New York - limited the reputation he acquired.

The brilliance of Fq is bound to herald wider recognition of his importance as a poet.

Fq was initially written while Brunton was writer in residence at the University of Canterbury in 1998, and takes the outward form of a kind of poetic diary or yearbook.

The sequence is divided into 12 parts, roughly equal in length and each containing between 10 and a dozen or so numbered poems, each part preceded by a lyric printed in italics.

The poems track the poet's sojourn through the year, from summer to summer, from arrival to departure, drawing innumerable sights and sounds from the environs of Christchurch into his poetic record, along with sci-fi and space-parlour heroics, surreal university gossip and a dozen other lines of reference:

The Casino glares

like NebuchadneZZar's palace of faiences beside the

smoky river

where Shoe wanders for the love of saintgod

quando will beings be free from Babylon with

the waters thereof unfit to drink?

Each step is more delirious than even a line by

Alan Brunton,

Life's supreme uranic poet,

Overseer of the Scribes of the Great Records.

Brunton's extraordinary rhetoric mixes unconventional typography and layout with an idiom that combines many different stylistic registers, heterodox references, and foreign phrases, somewhat reminiscent of James Joyce.

Fq is likely to have you frequently diving for the dictionary or encyclopedia, and it retains an element of mystery and occasional inaccessibility while never being so arcane as to repel interest and attention.

The character Shoe who figures above is one of a succession of personae adopted throughout the sequence, others being Roadman, X-Man, Roadster, Rooster and Road Knight.

Most of these point to the organising pattern of the sequence as a kind of quest romance (like Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen - one of the more polite connotations of the title).

The female object of the quest is also a constant name-and-shape changer. Sometimes she is BIJOU, sometimes Nadia, Polly Pop or Lola International, all manifestations of the unattainable beloved for whom our hero quests. As Brunton once said, he has always liked the big stories and has always been in the entertainment business.

Thirty years ago Brunton wrote in one of the aesthetic manifestos of which he was fond (untypically for a Kiwi), of "the poet as his own hero, his own jaunt through the patois of the tribe ... To write is to attempt to shore up certain fragments of the past, being the hurt of love before most else. To say: I have suffered these things; before silence takes the rest."

Such a grand and even romantic ambition sustained Brunton throughout his career and in a sense placed him increasingly at odds with the tidy ironies, charming details and modest assertions which most contemporary (especially Wellington) poets prefer.

Fq in its full-blooded, raunchy, savage, funny, bitter, erudite and lonely passion shows that in his poetry Brunton kept the romance alive that sustained him from the start.

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* Peter Simpson is an associate professor of English at the University of Auckland.