The Drummer

Ian Wedde

• Publisher: Auckland University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781775581796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

The Drummer is Ian Wedde's eighth collection and it is plump with exquisite visual images, lost faith in language, revelations of intense beauty and literary allusions (from the Romantics to the New Zealand tradition). This is what the author writes about his collection: 'The word 'transport' seems to me to describe an event anywhere between a bus-trip and a vision. The dogged example of Odysseus in one margin, the raptures of language in another. The bliss of movement, the transport of dreams. The word romance is uniting gravity and desire. It is the romance I wanted for poems and these are the few poems that got there.'

A BALLAD FOR WORSER HEBERLEY

for the Heberley Family Reunion, Pipitea Marae, Easter 1990

1

I remember the pohutukawas’ summer crimson

and the smell of two-stroke fuel

and the sandflies above the Waikawa mudflats

whose bites as a kid I found cruel.

At night and with gunny-sack muffled oars

when the sandflies were asleep

with a hissing Tilley lamp we’d go fishing

above the seagrass deep

— a-netting for the garfish there

where the nodding seahorses graze

and the startled flounders all take fright

stirring the muddy haze.

And who cared about the hungry sandflies

when a-codding we would go

my blue-eyed old man Chick Wedde and me

where the Whekenui tides do flow.

It’s swift they run by Arapaoa’s flanks,

and they run strong and deep,

and the cod-lines that cut the kauri gunwale

reach down to a whaler’s sleep.

When the tide was right and the sea was clear

you could see the lines go down

and each line had a bend in it

that told how time turns round.

The line of time bends round, my friends,

it bends the warp we’re in

and where the daylight meets the deep

a whaler’s yarns begin.

I feel a weight upon my line

no hapuku is here

but a weight of history swimming up

into the summer air.

Oil about the outboard motor

bedazzles the water’s skin

and through the surge of the inward tide

James Heberley’s story does begin.

2

In 1830 with a bad southerly abaft

soon after April Fool’s Day

on big John Guard’s Waterloo schooner

through Kura-te-au I made my way.

And I was just a sad young bloke

with a sad history at my back

when I ran in on the tide with mad John Guard

to find my life’s deep lack.

Seaspray blew over the seaward bluffs

the black rocks ate the foam

my father and my mother were both dead

and I was looking for home.

But what could I see on those saltburned slopes

but the ghosts of my career:

my father a German prisoner from Wittenburg

my grand-dad a privateer

my mother a Dorset woman from Weymouth,

I her first-born child,

and my first master was called Samuel Chilton

whose hard mouth never smiled.

He gave me such a rope-end thrashing

that I left him a second time,

I joined the Montagu brig for Newfoundland,

through desertion was reckoned a crime —

and me just a kid with my hands made thick

from the North Sea’s icy net,

eyes full of freezing fog off the haddock banks

and the North Sea’s bitter sunset.

And master Chilton that said when your mother dies

you can’t see her coffin sink

you can only blink at the salt mist

about the far land’s brink.

And in the fo’c’s’le’s seasick haven

where a lamp lit the bulkhead’s leak

you’d share your yarn with the foremast crew

your haven you would seek.

Where you came from the rich ate kippers

or if they chose, devilled eggs.

They didn’t blow on their freezing paws

they favoured their gouty legs.

And if you pinched an unripe greengage from their tree

they’d see you in the gallows

or if you were dead lucky

wading ashore through Botany Bay shallows.

But I was even luckier, as they say,

those who tell my tale:

they tell how my tale was spliced and bent

about the right whale’s tail.

And how poor young James Heberley

fresh from South Ocean’s stench

and the foretop’s winching burden of blubber

his great good fortune did wrench.

In autumn I came ashore at Te Awaiti

on Arapaoa Island.

‘Tangata Whata’ the Maori called me —

now ‘Worser’ Heberley I stand.

‘Ai! Tangata whata, haeremai,

haeremai mou te kai!’

Food they gave me, and a name,

in the paataka up high.

My name and my l...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Odysseus
• Taking Breath
• Hotel Terminus
• A Birthday Ode to the Muse
• Katrina’s Ballad
• Barbary Coast
• The Stowaway
• The Astronomer in Love
• Six False Starts …
• A Transport Disaster
• A Ballad for Worser Heberley
• Ode to Lee Hatherley’s Video
• The Insomniac’s Lexicon
• The Drummer
• Two Odes to Desire
• Ode to Unsealed Roads
• Astral Travel
• Back Cover