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Item Not to exact a full look at the worst : (mis)representations of state-sanctioned violence in New Zealand poetry : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand(Massey University, 2025-11-26) McLean, RobertThis thesis examines how local poetry written between the First World War and the early twenty-first century has represented state-sanctioned violence done in Aotearoa New Zealand and on the state’s behalf overseas. Although this period is marked by the emergence and consolidation of a distinct New Zealand literature and the New Zealand state’s deliberate involvement in major overseas conflicts, surprisingly few poems directly represent such violence. This thesis identifies and analyses poems written in English by Māori, Pacific, and Pākehā poets that do represent state-sanctioned violence: Donald H. Lea’s “Gold Stripe” from Stand Down! (1917); Allen Curnow’s Island and Time (1941); Kendrick Smithyman’s “Vignettes of the Māori Wars” from Flying to Palmerston (1968); Māori Battalion: A Poetic Sequence (2001) by Alistair Te Ariki Campbell; and Captain Cook in the Underworld (2002) by Robert Sullivan. I use a form of mimetic close reading to examine their sources, spatial and temporal renderings, attribution of agency, prosody and modes of representation, construal of legitimacy, and violence’s uses and effects. I determine how poetry’s conventions, licenses, limitations, and omissions have helped or hindered naming, understanding, and owning Aotearoa New Zealand’s state-sanctioned violence in these five poetic works. The evidence from this poetic archive testifies to a radical disjunction between state-sanctioned violence’s historical realities and how these examples of New Zealand poetry have represented of it. They have largely failed to give voice to what poet Geoffrey Hill called “the world’s real cries” by refusing to address directly the social, political, and legal sources of state-sanctioned violence’s meaningfulness and legitimisation.Item The unavailability of nature : anxieties of place and Pākehā identity in the writings of Pip Adam, Robin Hyde, and Blanche Baughan : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand(Massey University, 2020) Ferguson, MelanieThis thesis argues that the idea of nature is never fully available to Pākehā literature, and that is manifested as various kinds of anxiety and uncanny returns. It begins in the twenty first century with Pip Adam’s The New Animals (2017), which considers the effects of a consumerist society on not only the ecological state of the planet, but also the human psyche. From there it moves back to consider Robyn Hyde’s The Godwits Fly (1938), which offers a vision of Pākehā society as shaped by outdated sociological rules inherited from an idea of England, trapping both humans and animals in early twentieth century city streets with an existential awareness that native New Zealand, already, can no longer be located. Finally, Blanche Baughan’s “A Bush Section” (1908) is approached not simply as a vindication of the settler assault on nature, nor as a justification of bush clearing as a means to an end, but as an antecedent of both The Godwits Fly and The New Animals in its evocation of a sense of deep anxiety with regards to the preoccupation of imagining Pākehā belonging in relation to nature.Item The lyric "I" and the anti-confessionalism of Frederick Seidel : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand(Massey University, 2019) Upperton, Tomothy LawrenceThis thesis investigates the anti-Confessionalist status of the lyric “I” in the poetry of Frederick Seidel and in a collection of my own poems. Seidel’s use of autobiographical details, including his own name, in his poems has been treated by critics as an invitation to identify the lyric “I” with the poet himself. His poetry has been discussed by both his admirers and his detractors in a Confessional context. To his admirers, Seidel extends the Confessional poetry tradition in exciting ways, breaking new taboos as he incorporates details from his glamorous, privileged lifestyle into his poems. To his detractors, he is a retrograde reactionary, stale and derivative. I argue that although Seidel uses Confessional strategies, and owes obvious debts to Confessional poets, his poetry is fundamentally outward rather than inward looking; it is a poetry of cultural critique, and not of personal revelation. This outward looking focus also distinguishes Seidel’s poetry from various post-avant poetics that, in their own sophisticated ways, are as concerned with the subjective, lyric “I” as Confessional poetry is. I argue that in Frederick Seidel’s poetry, the lyric “I” is of interest insofar as it provides a means of cultural critique—a way of interrogating the complicity of the individual in its engagement with capitalism in its various aspects. In the poems that comprise the creative component of my thesis, the influence of Seidel is evident in their tone, their outward focus, and their limited interest in the lyric “I.” I have attempted in these poems to get beyond the absorption with the self that I perceive to be a besetting quality in much contemporary mainstream poetry. The various post-avant poetics explored in my research seem in their own ways deeply invested in the lyric “I.” Seidel’s poems offered other possibilities, other ways of representing the subject in the world, and of critiquing that world, that I could use in my own poems.Item Imagining ecologies : traditions of ecopoetry in Aotearoa New Zealand : a thesis submitted to Massey University in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Massey University of Palmerston North(Massey University, 2019) Newman, Janet ElizabethNew Zealand ecopoetry tells the stories of connection with and separation from the land. From the late nineteenth century until the present, opposing and changing notions of ecological loss and belonging have underlain New Zealand’s long lineage of ecopoetry in English. Yet, from a critical perspective, such a tradition is essentially invisible. Scholars have tended to fragment New Zealand ecopoetry according to themes and time periods. But taken as a whole, the tradition not only provides local stories of human relationships with nature transformed by colonialism, it challenges some established conceptions of ecopoetry. Discussions within the relatively new field of post-colonial ecocriticism revealthe importance of local writing. Scholars have emphasized that particular national histories especially in places of settler colonialism have “contributed to the hybridization and creolization of plants, peoples, and place in ways that profoundly denaturalize absolute ontological claims,” (DeLoughrey 2014 325). This approach recognises that rather than a global framework of ecological change, experiences differ according to specific locations and across different timeframes. With this approach in mind, the critical component of this thesis investigates the field of ecopoetry and maps New Zealand’s ecopoetic lineage. It reports on close readings and analysis of contemporary ecopoetry by three New Zealand poets: Brian Turner (b. 1944), Robert Sullivan (b. 1967) and Airini Beautrais (b. 1982). It finds that New Zealand ecopoetry portrays particular tensions about understandings of nature and the human relationship with it. These tensions challenge in specific ways some of the homogenizing, Eurocentric conceptions that prevail in foundational work carried out in the field of ecopoetry since the 1990s. The creative component is a collection of original ecopoems entitled Anti-Pastoral. These poems reflect on my own connection to land through farming over four generations of European settlement in New Zealand. Some poems focus on the degrading effects on people and animals of relatively recent shifts towards large-scale intensive farming. In the critical component I ask: How do we define and depict New Zealand’s long tradition of ecopoetry? How does that tradition speak back to and challenge existing definitions of ecopoetry and of ecology? In the creative component, I ask: How do I, a Pākehā poet and farmer, join that tradition?