Songs of the Maori King

Chris Faiers, winner of the 1987 Milton Acorn People’s Poetry Award,
is author of Foot Through the Ceiling.

New Zealand-born Stephen Chan has made a career of collecting degrees and working for the Commonwealth Youth Programme, including a stint as a government advisor in Africa. He now teaches at Oxford.

His preface tells us the exciting story of how the Maoris formed a loose federation in 1858 to oppose the European settlement of New Zealand. They even elected a king to try to unite and focus their uneasy alliance of tribes, and they fought a number of uneven battles against the European rangers. Unfortunately, Chan’s “songs” of the Maori kings are bare whines. After several readings I still can’t be sure whether I’m reading satire a la National Lampoon, or simply poetry so flatly inept and insipid as to border unintentionally on the hilarious. Let Chan warble some verses for us (from “Potatau’s Song of Kingship”):

I am Potatau, a king.
These are my forests in which I wander.
This is my hill.

My people are the Maoris.
They have strong limbs.
And fight for me.

I can’t for the life of me figure out why Sono Nis published this book. The production is excellent, the woodcuts are passable; but the “poetry” is outrageous. Perhaps they thought they were doing something progressive in this slow dawning of native rights around the world. Hold your breath for Chan’s “Songs from Wounded Knee,” or “The Love Chants of Anicinabe Park.”