Reference Points
Stranger within • Generation gap • Midwinter spring • Silent revolution • Trees, travelling • Under the wave • Magnolia • Augury • Four elements • Peacocks • Old house • Rainbird • Apocalypse
Histories
Historian • Portraits • The janitor • Ancestors • Yesterday's loss • Counter-revolution • Prayer of an elder • Robert Lowell • Social control • Waitomo • Parihaka • Rongopai
Myths and Emblems
Counter talk • The empty chair • The candle • Wave and shell • Increase and multiply • November 1978 • Rumpelstiltskin • Thumbelina • The swineherd • A Japanese tale • Solstice
Source: Out of Season: Poems. Wellington; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980
Electronic source: Out of Season: a TEI-conformant transcription
All poems © W. H. Oliver
Social control
Values, control, resources, data-base:
dominion over the creatures. In Aro
Street and Adelaide Road the problems
are breaking each other's heads. They
shall be counted and cured. The task
is the elimination of error. Popper
sighs gustily around the oblivious
tower of glass and steel holding us
high in a hand over the destroyed
city, neither the hand nor the city
of God, grieving, bereft as shapely
intimate dark houses collapse
under the huckster's hammer. The poor
lie cold in well-lighted rooms. Data.