EARTHBOUND MIRRORS (1984)
"Subtle and intriguing...Oliver appears here as a magician, a master of illusion ... A stylish and elegant work."
The New Zealand Listener
Horizontal Press - out of print
GUARDIANS, NOT ANGELS (1993)
"Oliver undermines the commonplace idea of reality governed by the tyranny of language."
The New Zealand Listener
Available from Hazard Press $19.95
ISLANDS OF WILDERNESS - A Romance (1996)
[in] The Wild Life - a four-in-one publication in which each poet is represented by one complete book of poetry. The other poets represented are: Coral Hull, David Curzon, Philip Hammial.
"There is a near perfect balance ... the refracted nostalgia of this also has echoes of Quasimodo."
Australian Book Review
Available from Penguin Books Australia $19.95
UNMANNED (1999)
"The writing is richly textured, a sensual music... The rhythms are muscular, pointed by a sure sense for lineation. The book is equally rich in images... marvellously evocative."
New Zealand Books
"The poems display a remarkable range of voices and tones."
Antipodes (USA)
Available from HeadworX Publishers NZ $19.95 Aust $17.95
NIGHT OF WAREHOUSES: Poems 1978 - 2000 (2001)
"The incantatory is a difficult mode to master. The obvious skill displayed by Oliver’s first book might have tempted some poets to rest on their laurels, ... Earthbound Mirrors is where the story really begins to get interesting, for me. I find this repeated use of a phrase, in different contexts, with different local significances, with no particular reference to the fact one’s doing it, an original and daring strategy. No clear precedents spring to mind ... a thing so unusual, in fact, that it’s hard to think of precedents in New Zealand poetry."
Poetry NZ
"Night of Warehouses … is a rather astounding collection: … what finally impressed me [is] the balance between a cosmopolitan view that celebrates all walks of life, and a focused curiosity about the most specific and tiny of moments … I have great praise for some of the older poems in this collection, I find his collection & Interviews to be as striking and moving with its language as anything cummings ever did, and grumbled out loud as to why I hadn't been exposed to these poems in various classroom settings … This is a poet who has lived and died and is somehow still alive. The final collection in Night of Warehouses is simply called New Poems. This last collection is just as epic an attempt as & Interviews. "Oldest Pine" is an inspired almost sublime thought experiment on the life of an ancient pine tree, concluding beautifully … Indeed, if owning a great book of poetry by a greatly under appreciated poet doesn't interest you, then how about simply owning a great book of poetry? Stephen Oliver's Night of Warehouses is simply that: a great book of poetry full of the world, and ever mindful of the truth."
Word Riot
"... Oliver’s talent for the memorable and the new image ... This talent for making us see afresh could be pointed to in a hundred places, and is what for me marks Oliver as a notable poet ... this collection also reveals an impressive number of perfectly crafted works ... the body of work should serve to assure Oliver’s place within the literary tradition. But I think what most stands out, besides the complete conviction of the voice, is the astonishing facility for image. At times the perception is acute ... At other times the description is full and intensely seen, but also highly original ... it is the sheer audacity of an image which changes the way we see the world."
Glottis
"Stephen Oliver is one of our neglected poets, he has been a loner outside the mainstream ...I do not dispute Oliver's analysis of modern society ... they are effective poems ... the despair and disillusionment are focused ... Yeats summed it up magnificently: 'Man is in love, and loves what vanishes.' Oliver's work exemplifies this sense of romantic loss. But he also carries a huge despair at humanity's folly and stupidity. I hope he keeps writing about it."
JAAM
"While Oliver is, obviously, committed to the written word, his poetry is based in sound – yet to call it ‘oral’ would seem to undercut its sophistication, the rather cold brilliance of its knowing and doing. There’s an idiom used in Siberia to describe the sound of a branch cracking and falling from a forest tree in extreme frost; it translates in English as ‘the whisper of stars’. Stephen Oliver’s poetry makes many equivalents to it, in both sense and sound."
Overland
Available from HeadworX Publishers NZ $26.95 Aust $21.95
DEADLY POLLEN (2003)
"I can convey something of the fineness of Oliver’s craftsmanship in his translation of Horace’s ‘Pyrrha’ ode, a translation which fits into Oliver’s theme of disillusionment, and of his modernist distrust of beauty in person and in diction. The quiet intensity, and the distanced, almost intellectualized sensuality, of the language in which Oliver brings alive the golden-haired Pyrrha, Horace’s femme fatale, is perfect:
Pyrrha, your dewy hair,
yellow, scented, doubly wreathed
in Jasmine, fresh from the trellis
this morning…. (lyric 12)
Nor is Oliver’s ambition here as limited as it might seem, for in taking on such a translation Oliver is setting himself up against a history of translations, and most notably one by Milton. It is a challenge in which he succeeds admirably."
JAS Review of Books
"Many of the lyrics are perfect, and thematically the poem traverses many of the issues which are at the heart of poetry today: from the modernist legacy of deep worries over memory and metaphor, to a more contemporary juxtaposition of dictions and registers, and a concern with post-modernism and the end of history."
Takahe
"The movement which takes an historical event – the bombing of the Sari Nightclub in Bali on October 12, 2002 – into the 'slipstream above the stratosphere' is also the movement of transtasman poet Stephen Oliver’s admirable 2003 chapbook: Deadly Pollen . To be more precise, two movements dominate here. The first sends history into the stratosphere: 'Time passes – that pressure in space again' (Poem 7). According to the second movement, the laws of Newtonian physics reassert themselves and there are so many particular things that fall: sand, dust, snow, 'star flecks, nova spittle' (Poem 26). Earthly bombing becomes nova explosion. The poem’s perspective expands until it collapses under its own metaphysical weight into an even smaller, even more constricted topos : 'in an emptied / space within a space caved under' (Poem 2). This is the cosmic claustrophobia characterising the sequence of thirty-one granular poems making up the (w)hole of 'Deadly Pollen.' "
Colloquy
"The imagery is dense, powerful, careful, well-crafted and intrinsically poetic, something that could easily have suffered given the nature of the subject matter, but Stephen seems to walk a fine line between the actual and the poets apprehension of the meta-physical, the sheer emptiness that underlies:
'The litterateur tracked back through / his ISBN to no man's land '. It is both an invective and a commentary about the contemporary state of affairs: 'CEO's in castles cascade / in cash, silent as a cyber virus.' It is also, as is shown by the translation of Horace's ode 'Pyrrha', simply well written poetry: 'Pyrrha, your dewy hair / yellow, scented, doubly wreathed / in Jasmine, fresh from the trellis / this morning - your new lover yet to / arrive, breathless.'
It is almost refreshing these days to come across a book of poems that deals essentially with external events, world politics, human actions, though Oliver is craftsman enough to couple them with that elusive sense of the mysterious; the anagogic: 'The druid notched these events / onto trunks that lead to deeper wood - / envisioned - silence, incantation; / the God found within the stone.' "
brief
Available from Word Riot Press http://www.wordriot.org/ US $6.00 NZ/Aust $9.95
BALLADS, SATIRE & SALT - A Book of Diversions (2003)
"A celebration of the linkage between spoken word and the written. Oliver tells us to go back to the songs, the oral traditions of ballads, nursery rhyme and nonsense lyric and listen to the movement of the form, and to explore them. His agility and facilitation with voice - be it monologue, internal dialogue or contemporary use of language - snares the reader and presents a diverse and believable cast of characters."
Cordite
"These vastly different poems serve, in part, to show Oliver’s technical range and diversity of themes. Oliver’s poems persistently confront truth, no matter how discomforting it may be. One of the triumphs of this persistence is 'Wildlife Trade' with its 'Roll Call' of exotic birds and endangered species, which are
Neatly placed in your alligator-
Skin, double-belted, Hartmann-leather,
Silk-lined, false bottom suitcase.
Ballads, Satire & Salt ends with two poems, no doubt deliberately placed to confront each other, which between them offer images of resilience and joy to balance against the surrounding satirical poems, and do so with that delicate exactness of utterance that makes Oliver so exemplary a poet."
Stylus
"Ballads, Satire & Salt is an interesting if mixed book, and a must for any serious collection of New Zealand poetry. The best of its pieces -- except 'Election Year Blues' which is clearly light verse -- are those which, ... challenge by their implicit seriousness the accuracy of the subtitle, 'A Book of Diversions'. In fact Oliver is adept at exploiting the techniques of both poetry and verse, finding in each elements which when combined live as poetry in the broader, most meaningful sense. "
JAAM
"This is seasoned stuff that will, in quite abrupt turns, caress you and the punch you repeatedly in the face. "
Canta
"There is violence of the Romper-Stomper variety in Ballads, Satire and Salt: a Book of Diversions , as in the parody of a German drinking song 'Gaudeamus Igitur'. In 'Uncle Ben' Oliver's attack on a different form of violence amuses then sours like a tartrazine-coated lolly. Repercussions between adulthood and childhood and between the text and its footnotes are skilfully established to draw us deep into this story and its ramifications.
The book is a delight for those who enjoy craftsmanship in poetry. The 'Keyboard Cantata', for example, with its recitative '<greymouse caught@play>', has the feel of a harpsichord yet achieves the sensitivity of the piano. The 'Ballad of Witty Ticcy Ray' is a metrical joy ride. The pencil drawings by Matt Ottley, also a musician, respond to the text with something like a visual acrobatic: imaginative leaps, and drawings that come out at you. Each is as individual a response to the world as the poem it accompanies."
Sugar Mule
Available from Greywacke Press NZ $19.95 Australia $18.95
Distributed in New Zealand by:
Titus Books
P.O.Box 102
Waimauku West Auckland
ph/fax 411 9445 titus@snap.net.nz
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