O'BRIEN, Gregory (Leo)

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Nationality: New Zealander (also Irish citizen). Born: Matamata, Waikato, 9 April 1961. Education: University of Auckland, 1980–83,B.A. 1984. Family: Married Jenny Bornholdt, q.v., in 1994; two sons.

Career: Since 1984 writer and artist. Writer-in-residence, 1995, and since 1997 teacher of creative writing, Victoria University, Wellington. Since 1997 part-time curator, Wellington City Gallery. Awards: Sargeson fellowship, 1988. Address: 26 Waipapa Road, Hataitai, Wellington, New Zealand.

Publications

Poetry

Location of the Least Person. Auckland, Auckland University Press, 1987.

Dunes & Barns. Auckland, Modern House, 1988.

Man with a Child's Violin. Christchurch, Caxton, 1990.

Great Lake. Sydney, Local Consumption, 1991.

Malachi. Adelaide, Australia, Little Esther Books, 1993.

The Long Fall from Splendour to Splendour. Auckland, Puriri Press, 1993.

Days beside Water. Auckland, Auckland University Press, 1993;Manchester, Carcanet, 1994.

Irishman & Industry. Auckland, Pear Tree Press, 1997.

Winter I Was. Wellington, Victoria University Press, 1999.

Novel

Diesel Mystic. Auckland, Auckland University Press, 1989.

Other

Moments of Invention. Auckland, Heinemann Reed, 1988.

Nigel Brown. Auckland, Random House, 1991.

Lands and Deeds. Auckland, Godwit, 1996.

Hotere-Out the Black Window. Auckland, Godwit, 1997.

Co-editor, White Horse Black Dog. Wellington, Sport, 1995.

Co-editor, My Heart Goes Swimming: New Zealand Love Poems. Auckland, Godwit, 1996.

Co-editor, An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry. Auckland, Oxford University Press, 1996.

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Critical Study: By Margaret Mahy, in Landfall, 44(1), March 1990.

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Gregory O'Brien is both a poet and a painter and latterly a valued, one might almost say a necessary, voice in the public presentation of the work of major New Zealand artists—notably Colin McCahon and Ralph Hotere-and in the articulation, not of a theory, but of a language and a set of reference points for talking about them. He has sometimes illustrated his own poems, and their visual elements are unusually strong.

As a poet, O'Brien has always been confident, fluent, inventive, and industrious, beginning as something like a surrealist, in which almost everything in the picture was "real," or had a recognizable foundation in "fact," but was chosen and arranged in comic or disconcerting conjunctions. It was a kind of wit that had great charm and was happy to risk the charge of whimsy. But soon the real, the natural and recognizable order of things, was being allowed predominance and authority, though still with the underlying sense that its stability was hardly more than a pact dictated by social convenience. Thus the natural order of things was seen as our necessary myth, our convention of representation, causing us to overlook the miracles of absurd conjunction that are around us all the time.

Observant, excited, always on the move, O'Brien has remained a quirky aggregator, a maker of lists and connections, a teller of tales and tallies. Loquacious and nervous, quick, clever and affectionate, amusing and engaging—l'homme, c'est le style. "The camera is a chatterbox / of the eyes," he writes in one poem, seeming to catch an aspect of self in the characterization.

There is also, lurking somewhere behind this life energy, the bleak knowledge that we occupy a universe that is flying apart and that any slight sense we have of controlling our own destiny is an illusion. So we must keep talking to one another and perhaps to God. O'Brien's poems all have the sound of a voice, of communication that hopes for communion, of language as the game by which we prove ourselves, the instrument with which we divert ourselves while the sun goes down.

Through the second half of the 1990s his work continued playful and the touch light, but there was a steadying of focus and a gain in ballast as life commitments (love, marriage, children) made the need for some kind of "faith" more urgent. In this sense, more than in the sense that O'Brien's Catholicism is important to him (which it is), many, perhaps all, of his poems can be seen as prayers. But they are neither solemn nor unserious, and they have, in Keats's phrase, no "palpable design" on the reader. O'Brien is a kind of priest who intones, "Let us play." And the piety is real.

O'Brien's poems are also often stories, unplotted narratives that continue to reveal, as his early work did, how unordinary the ordinary is. Deadpan astonishment is his stock-in-trade. The places we inhabit are as absurd as they are beautiful. Seeing is believing, and the surprise of it seldom wanes or wavers.

These narratives mix disparate elements without apology (but usually with explanatory notes!). He is a huge raider of history—big and small, local and family—of biography, and of locations, spaces, and landscapes, always giving his readers a sense of rapid movement through space (his poems travel) and time (things are always happening where things have happened). There is copiousness, untidiness, clutter, and jitter. There is also reflection, a reaching beyond the comic, droll, or bizarre toward the sad shadows of general truths.

Perhaps what holds this all together is the consistency with which the painter's eye pulls everything into scenes:

A woman is kneeling in a stream—
  the mist is a sponge drawing the town
up into itself. Dogs lie around the park
like battered violins
  their music scattered...

In the very best, the absolutely proper, sense—the sense of a great tradition—everything in O'Brien's poetry, even the eloquence, is borrowed and reused. He has made his proper connections with those who have gone before, and his lines are open to the future.

—C.K. Stead