IRELAND, Kevin (Mark)

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Nationality: New Zealander. Born: Auckland, 18 July 1933. Family: Married Phoebe Caroline Ireland. Career: Founding editor, Mate magazine, Auckland; assistant editor, Quote magazine, Auckland. Writer-in-residence, Canterbury University, 1986; Sargeson fellow, Auckland, 1987; literary fellow, Auckland University, 1988, 1990. Awards: Commemoration medal, 1990; OBE, 1993. Address: 8 Domain Street, Devonport, New Zealand.

Publications

Poetry

Face to Face. Christchurch, Pegasus Press, 1963.

Educating the Body. Christchurch, Caxton Press, 1968.

A Letter from Amsterdam. London, Amphadesma Press, 1972.

Orchids, Hummingbirds, and Other Poems. Auckland, Auckland University Press-Oxford University Press, 1974; London, Oxford University Press, 1975.

A Grammar of Dreams. Wellington, Wai-te-ata Press, 1975.

Literary Cartoons. Auckland, Island-Hurricane Press, 1978.

The Dangers of Art: Poems 1975–1980. Auckland, Cicada Press, 1980.

Practice Night in the Drill Hall. Auckland and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984.

The Year of the Comet: Twenty-six 1986 Sonnets. Auckland, Islands Press, 1986.

Selected Poems. Auckland and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987.

Tiberius at the Beehive. Auckland and Oxford, Oxford University Press. 1990.

Skinning a Fish. Christchurch, Hazard Press, 1994.

Selected Poems. Christchurch, Hazard Press, 1997.

Short Stories

Sleeping with Angels. Auckland, Penguin, 1995.

Other

Blowing My Top. Auckland, Penguin, 1996.

The Man Who Never Lived. Auckland, Random House, 1997.

Under the Bridge and over the Moon. Auckland, Random House, 1999.

Editor, The New Zealand Collection: A Celebration of the New Zealand Novel. Auckland, Random House, 1989.

Translator, Poems, by Hristo Botev. Sofia, Bulgaria, Sofia Press, 1974.

*  *  *

"Thin men /write gaunt poems /and each word /sticks out /like a rib." Kevin Ireland's lines from the early poem "Deposition" also describe his own style at the time. His witty, whimsical conceits and explorations of metaphor found apt expression in poems using short lines, complex rhyme schemes, and patterns of words and phrases recurring from stanza to stanza.

Such writing relies for its success on the accurate selection and placement of individual words to hold the reader's attention and patience while the poet works out the implications of his metaphor. At times the central notion fails to sustain the poem, but Ireland's wit and sense of humor help to keep the reader's interest alive; often, indeed, it is these asides that make the slighter poems worth reading. Occasionally, Ireland's writing can fall lamentably flat, as in these lines from the late poem "A Birthday Card for Sixty": "I suppose I must have done an awful lot /of breathing, without thinking, mind /uninvolved in the mechanics of what /was going on …"

In "A Shrinking World" Ireland writes of New Zealand as remembered from childhood and of the homeland rediscovered on returning:

   Rangitoto just yesterday
   seemed a mile high
   and stretched right across the sea
   now it is near enough
   to throw stones at
   and small enough to miss

He also writes of poetry and of love; he celebrates friendships, as the roll call of dedicatees attests; and he pillories weasel words and hypocrisy, especially from the lips of politicians, as in these lines from "Forgetting" (Tiberius at the Beehive):

   Forgetting leads
   the way: it straightens out the kinks,
   sweeps away the clutter of technicalities.
   It leads the assault on the treacheries
   of the archives. It demolishes doubt,
 
 
   obliterates contradiction, blots out disrespect.
   Forgetting is the entrance to the new order.

The more open, relaxed style evident in A Letter from Amsterdam also characterizes the love poems of Orchids, Hummingbirds, and Other Poems, with their wry, affectionate humor. In the conversational (and uneven) "broken sonnets" of The Year of the Comet Ireland celebrates his return to New Zealand. Whatever style he essays, however, he knows that

   there are some poems that work
   and some that don't
   in the end there is just the one difference

The title poem "Skinning a Fish" is an extended meditation on the practice of disciplined action that moves from detailed instructions for skinning (or perhaps boning) a fish, through military drill (once compulsory for New Zealand schoolboys), to the chance that flicks a fish scale into the eye. It concludes with a résumé of its themes, stated with a precision and cogency that marks a new feature of Ireland's writing:

                 Getting the knife in.
        Doing it all by the book. Detaching
        the skin from the flesh. The mathematics
 
 
   of uncertainty. The way to survive.
        Luckily you forget these things
        by experience until you no longer
 
   remember forgetting. Loving then returns
        as second nature. Like skinning
        a fish. A feeling for flesh.

—Alan Roddick