EDMOND, Lauris (Dorothy)

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Nationality: New Zealander. Born: Lauris Dorothy Scott on 2 April 1924. Education: Napier Girls High School, 1937–41; University of Waikato, Hamilton, B.A. 1968; Victoria University, Wellington, M.A. (honors) 1972. Family: Married Trevor Edmond in 1945; four daughters and one son. Career: Teacher, Huntly College, 1968–69, and Heretaunga College, Wellington, 1970–72; editor, Post-Primary Teachers Association, Wellington, 1973–80. Since 1980 off-campus tutor and lecturer, Massey University, Palmerston North. Writer-inresidence, Deakin University, Melbourne, 1985. Founded periodical, New Zealand Books, 1990. Awards: New Zealand P.E.N. award, 1975; Katherine Mansfield-Menton fellowship, 1981; Commonwealth poetry prize, 1985; Lilian Ida Smith award, 1987; A.W. Reed Lifetime Achievement award, 1999. D.Litt.: Massey University, 1988. O.B.E. (Officer, Order of the British Empire), 1986. Address: 22 Grass Street, Oriental Bay, Wellington, New Zealand. Died: 28 January 2000.

Publications

Poetry

In Middle Air. Christchurch, Pegasus Press, 1975.

The Pear Tree and Other Poems. Christchurch, Pegasus Press, 1977.

Salt from the North. Wellington, Oxford University Press, 1980.

Seven. Wellington, Wayzgoose Press, 1980.

Wellington Letter. Wellington, Mallinson Rendel, 1980.

Catching It. Auckland, Oxford University Press, 1983.

Selected Poems. Auckland, Oxford University Press, 1984.

Seasons and Creatures. Auckland, Oxford University Press, and Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1986.

Summer near the Arctic Circle. Auckland, Oxford University Press 1988.

New and Selected Poems. Auckland, Oxford University Press, and Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1991.

Scenes from a Small City. N.p., Daphne Brasell Associates, 1994.

Selected Poems 1975–1994. N.p., Bridget Williams Books, 1994.

A Matter of Timing. Auckland University Press, 1996.

In Position. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1996.

50 Poems. N.p., Bridget Williams Books, 1999.

Plays

Between Night and Morning (produced Wellington, 1980).

Radio Plays: The Mountain (cycle of 4 plays), 1980–81.

Novel

High Country Weather. Sydney, Allen and Unwin, and Wellington, Port Nicholson Press, 1984.

Other

Autobiographical Series:

Hot October: An Autobiographical Story. Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1989.

Bonfires in the Rain. N.p., Bridget Williams Books, 1991.

The Quick World. N.p., Bridget Williams Books, 1992.

An Autobiography. N.p., Bridget Williams Books, 1994.

Editor, Dancing to My Tune: Verse and Prose, by Denis Glover. Wellington, Catspaw Press, 1974.

Editor, Young Writing. Wellington, P.E.N. New Zealand Centre, 1979.

Editor, A Remedial Persiflage, by Chris Ward. Wellington, Post Primary Teachers Association, 1980.

Editor, The Letters of A.R.D. Fairburn. Wellington, Oxford University Press, 1981.

Editor, with Carolyn Milward, Women in Wartime: New Zealand Women Tell Their Story. Wellington, Government Printing Office, 1986.

Editor, with Bill Sewell and Harry Ricketts, Under Review: A Selection from 'New Zealand Books' 1991–1996. N.p., Daphne Brasell Associates, 1997.

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Manuscript Collection: Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.

Critical Studies: In New Zealand Listener (Wellington), 11 June 1983; Landfall (Christchurch), September 1983; "A Fine Flowering" by Barbara Giles, in Overland (Melbourne), 103, July 1986; "Top of the Poets" by Gillian Mawrey, in Commonwealth, 28(4), March 1986; "Privileged Happyland?" by Bernard O'Donoghue, in Poetry Review (London), 78(1), spring 1988.

Lauris Edmond comments:

(1984) I came to poetry publishing late—though I had always written some, even during the busiest years when I lived in country towns and brought up my six children. In 1974 I first sent poems to an editor (of Islands, a New Zealand literary journal); they were accepted, and I began seriously to work on half-finished drafts and notes. By 1975 I had a manuscript ready for publication, and I have published five further volumes since then, with a Selected Poems this year.

The chief effect of this pattern of living my life first, as it were, and becoming a committed writer second is that all my work is filled with a sense of relationship. This is sometimes with people but also with events, experiences, the natural world; I don't think I write anything without this sense of being a part of a larger experience, and in relationship with it, being expressed in some way.

This quality is reflected in the process of writing by my awareness that the creation of a poem is as much a matter of listening as speaking; the experience which lies at the center of the poem has from the moment of inception its own life, to which I as poet respond. Since I have an abiding sense of the living quality in the natural environment, and the psychological environment in which I live, it seems natural to me to find this relationship again and again, even in the smallest details of existence, each of which has its own uniqueness.

I wrote my first novel because I was awarded the writer's fellowship which sends a New Zealand writer to the south of France for a year, to live in Menton. I do not believe that poetry can be written according to any kind of organized program, so I wrote a novel, and having done so, I intend to write others. I found an immediate parallel between the vitality of the "world of the poem" and that of the fictional world of my novel, though many of the details of the writing process were different.

Beginning late has some obvious advantages, though I didn't do it by conscious choice. The main one is that the maturity that one hopes has been learned in thirty years of adult life forms the basic outlook or point of view in everything I write. Some kinds of apprenticeship, it seems, do not have to be passed through. There is also a considerable sense of urgency, which I think may give pace and energy to my writing. The volume of Selected Poems shows rather less variation between early and later poems than a poet who began writing in youth would display. And I could never regret my children!

(1995) During the last six years I have been working on a three-volume autobiography, recently reissued as a single volume. I have found the process extraordinarily revealing as a way of understanding why my writing began so late. It has aroused a major response and has been seen as a central story of women of my generation. Now that the work is finished my concern has been to discover if—and in what ways—this has affected my poetry writing. Certainly the internal reverberations have taken a long time to settle, and only in the last few months have I been able to go back—or move on—to a new departure in poetry. I find that writing poems is still my first choice of occupation, rather than the fiction I thought I would return to. I am working at present on a long sequence of poems that document in various ways the moral, intellectual, and spiritual journeys of my later life.

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Lauris Edmond's outpouring of poetry, including a volume of selected poems that won the 1985 Commonwealth poetry prize, comes comparatively late in a life devoted initially to a large family in a small New Zealand town. While recognizing in her Landfall interview that she has "the powerful enthusiasm of the late starter," Edmond is pleased to have been able to experience a "personal life" and then a career.

Her first volume, In Middle Air, sounds recurrent themes: the brutality of rural living (of a sensitive boy it is sneered, "He'll roughen up"), the cold alienness of the physical environment, the ravages of time, and the necessity for love ("We starve alone") and for putting observation into words. There is, however, a strain of high romantic lyricism that is at odds with the more supple, intimate dramatic sense that was slowly to emerge as the poet's distinctive voice, along with an uncertainty of line. In The Pear Tree the line fits more naturally a more forthright voice, often addressing friends (male or female) as "you" and arguing for philosophical positions such as the importance of the here and now. A series of portraits of older women forms a minor theme in Edmond's writing, as in "At Mary's House," which typically draws analogies between body, spirit, and the natural landscape ("nobody / has weeded here for a long time").

In Wellington Letter the poet criticizes her people—"we cultivate mind's middle distances." Instead, Edmond tries to move up close to experience or to stand back and make a crisp generalization, for instance, that the great poets had "unshakeable courage." The dangers of bald poetic philosophizing are obvious, and Edmond has since wisely moved toward the quotidian—"it was not anything achieved; / the art was just to let it happen." Thus the first half of Salt from the North shows a surer focus and sense of line and an unforced completeness in each poem. Unfortunately, in the second half of that volume and in Catching It the moralizing creeps in, effective only when it proceeds from a vivid personal setting, as, for example, in "Latter Day Lysistrata," an antiwar poem in which the poet in her garden protests male folly:

   Let us show them the vulnerable
   earth, the transparent light that slips
   through slender birches falling over
   small birds that sense in the minuscule
   threads of their veins …

Many of Edmond's poems are about trees, their rootedness and memories. The 1981 Mansfield fellowship in Menton gave her roots and a perspective from elsewhere to revitalize her poetry. In Catching It the lines are often shorter and surer, the moment or performance brought off more often. Whether she is gazing back home ("I am the child of exiles who dreamt / of the lost garden") or at Frenchmen sitting in a town square, she "catches it." Her dominant sense of transience and death finds strong dramatic form in the poem "At Delphi," in which she imagines the sacrifice of an older woman.

Although Edmond's work in poetry slowed while she wrote her multivolume autobiography, she has consolidated her reputation as one of New Zealand's foremost poets with several further volumes, including Seasons and Creatures and Summer near the Arctic Circle. While Seasons continues to use as subject matter the things of daily life—flowers, cats, cows, family, neighbors—Summer, as its title suggests, often goes further afield, indicating a widening scope and audience. In "Commonwealth Poetry Tour" Edmond acknowledges this movement outward: "So it grew, tiny convincing universe / feeling its frailty, marvelling at its passion …"

Less varied in tone and subject matter than her countrywoman Fleur Adcock, less philosophically inclined than Judith Wright, Edmond also sometimes lacks the metrical variety of each of these poets, but this is the distinguished company in which she now belongs. She has built up a commanding body of work, and her voice has always been crisp, clear, and articulate. If her writing seems addressed primarily to her own pleasure, as is evidenced by "Cows"—

   They do not suppose this matters,
   nor that anything else does—indeed,
   they do not suppose. Their time is entirely
   taken up with the delicious excruciating
   digestion of existence
   and if they please me on the by-pass road
   in the ripening sun this morning
   that is wholly my affair.

—then we are privileged to be party to it.

—David Dowling and

Theresa Werner