Poetry
Dominion
A. R. D. Fairburn · 1938
Synopsis
Five movements on the New Zealand of the Depression of the thirties. The first, ironically titled Utopia, puts an economic system on the verge of collapse on trial: civil servants, legislators and moneylenders are all taken in turn. The second traces white colonisation and compares the decline of the British Empire with that of Rome; the third turns to the native land, the soil, the wind and the rock. A dialogue between two voices follows, one of them nihilistic, calling for destruction, before a final movement.
Context
The poem appeared in 1938 from Denis Glover's Caxton Press. Its five parts are titled Utopia, Album Leaves, Elements, Dialogue and Struggle in a Mirror, and its open construction owes much to English-language modernist poetry, that of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Its author, who had worked during the Depression among the unemployed engaged on relief works, transposes that experience into it. Critics have noted the unevenness of the whole, whose registers, satirical, lyrical or didactic, do not always agree.
Who it is for
A poem in a single piece, never translated into French, which moves from the bitterest satire to meditation.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the most important political poem written in New Zealand, and as the most significant work the Depression inspired in the country.