Peter Dane's poems inspired by a love that has lasted

By GILBERT WONG

It has been a long time between poems for Peter Dane. His first collection, Twenty-four Sonnets, was written in 1968. His latest, The Albatross is Dead, has landed 32 years later.

Written from the perspective of a wronged woman, Jane, the 60 sonnets chronicle the emotional breakdown of a relationship: the betrayal, hurt and terrible loss.

The wild turmoil Jane experiences is expressed in the strict, 14-line pentameter rhythm favoured by Dante and Petrarch.

The form is traditional, but Jane's emotions are contemporary, universal and, at times, painful to read.

Your home. You hated me to make it mine.

I was to camp in a deserted shrine,

Make do, fit in, no matter how I hurt.

Yet you moved into me. Every pretence

And every lie designed to rearrange

My inner space. You made it yours and strange

To me - knowing that love has no defence.

"It was in no way planned," Dane says. "It took the sonnet form because it deals with love. Sonnets dealing with love are 800 years old."

He reverts to the lecturer he once was: "Though there are sonnets on other topics, its origins relate to the song the lover sings to the beloved.

"Once accompanied and melodious, they became internalised songs."

He is more hesitant about what prompted him to write these sonnets of heartbreak over an intense, four-month period in 1998, but finally he agrees that they are a penance, an act of devotion to his wife, Gabriele, a sustained song prompted by their love.

"I put my wife through similar emotions, though the marriage did not break - I take no credit for that. My wife has the capacity to love and care. Our relationship, thank God, didn't break, though it got close to that.

"They are an act of reparation. When my wife went through it, I didn't want to know and said, 'Don't emote so much,' when what I love her so much for is her rich emotional life."

Her response to the sonnets?

"She loves them, because they have an honesty, that I have become 'Jane' - the honesty of emotions that she hasn't found in me because I have found it so hard to express them."

He seems surprised at what has happened. "After more than 50 years of marriage I found a way of expressing emotions fully and cleanly with a way to hold on to the flux and reflux of anger and compassion, deep anguish and celebration."

Yes, celebration. As Dane remarks, Shelley talked of the "delight of the grief of love" fuelling the poet's imagination.

More than 40 years in this country have done little to smooth away an accent and mannerisms moulded during his childhood in Berlin.

A child of refugees, he became one himself, completing a degree at London University and teaching in Uganda before he arrived in Auckland. His hawk nose and high, intelligent forehead will be familiar to a generation of students at the University of Auckland where, for 25 years until his retirement in 1986, he did his best to instil a sense of respectful understanding for metaphysical poetry and other topics in annual waves of English literature students.

Now 79, his retirement can hardly be called that. He grew avocados on an organic orchard near Ninety Mile Beach and remains a fierce environmentalist, having served as director and treasurer of the Friends of the Earth. He and Gabriele now live in the Bay of Islands, where they maintain a full and busy life.

He gives his strange, coughing laugh, as the questions prompt him to reflect on how fate has delivered him a life.

"All the important things in life except for my wife, I did not choose."

No immigrant is without regrets, but Dane loves his adopted home: "This landscape, this openness that dwarfs you, the sense of being the only people on a beach that is possible. For us, the two of us, that is heaven."

* The Albatross is Dead: Sixty Sonnets by Peter Dane (Hudson Cresset $22.95)