Ruth Dallas: A writer’s life by Diana Morrow and This Moment, Every Moment: Ruth Dallas, Collected Poems

I’m wondering if I’ve just lived through the quintessential ‘Southern’ summer of my life, striking out for Central Otago in early January with two regionally appropriate biographies on the backseat of the car – Diana Morrow’s Ruth Dallas: A writer’s life and Roger Hickin’s life of Peter Olds, Minding his own poetry composing business. Olds (1944–2023) and Dallas (1919–2008) strike me as the Southern Man and Southern Woman of New Zealand Letters par excellence (a point I’ve made about Dallas before). A perfectly calibrated summer’s reading it turned out to be.

Yet it is hard to think of two poets more different, on the surface, than Dallas and Olds. The former is strong-willed but at the same time unassuming and committed to a quietly intense inner-life – ‘I don’t like excitement. I like calm,’ Dallas told Marion McLeod in a 1991 Listener interview. Olds, by way of contrast, is not averse to making a noise, a splash, a ruckus on the page as in the public space. On one hand, we have the poet as Zen priestess/farm-girl, and on the other the poet as V8-driving hoon, night-owl and outsider-prophet/savant.

Yet these very different publications have a surprising amount in common, both being level-headed, perceptive biographies, deeply sympathetic to their subjects (but sensibly critical as needs be). Both avoid pyrotechnics and interpretive acrobatics. After reading both, to my surprise I was left with a strong sense of the poets’ common ground. Neither was a ruralist in the Great Outdoors sense; both liked the notion of moving through/inhabiting an adjusted landscape, alert to tremors of human history rather than any sense of overarching Romanticised nature. Their most natural habitat was the edge of town/city/nation or travelling the avenues (Dallas’s ‘Country Road’) and pathways that link urban and rural realities, cultivated sensibility and earthly existence.

Interestingly, there are strong overlaps and echoes in their actual lives: an attachment to ‘The South’, unconventional employment histories, health problems (including, in both cases, impaired vision), a parallel struggle to make ends meet. And, on the redemptive side of the equation, a bookish yearning and an eye for the ordinary thing that is somehow extraordinary. Both biographies should be prescribed reading for all aspiring young poets. A sticker could be affixed to the cover of both: ‘This is How It is Done’. For all their temperamental and aesthetic differences, Dallas and Peter Olds had a shared purpose, honesty, curiosity and belief in their art.

Diana Morrow’s Ruth Dallas: A writer’s life sits well alongside the new edition of her subject’s collected poems, This Moment, Every Moment. Not only does Dallas emerge from both publications as an approachable and hugely rewarding poet on her own terms, she also configures as a vital link between earlier poets such as Mary Ursula Bethell and Eileen Duggan and more recent ‘nature’-inclined writers such as Peter Hooper, Joanna Margaret Paul, Dinah Hawken and Bernadette Hall. Her lines feel relevant as well as fresh. She has gusto and dexterity, a head full of words and a great desire – as opposed to worldly ambition – to make poems. With a further 50 pages of poetry added to the 2000 edition of Dallas’s Collected Poems, the new 400-page compendium includes all of Dallas’s 2006 collection, The Joy of a Ming Vase, and a clutch of juvenilia. This Moment… is the definitive compilation of a life’s work, impeccably designed and bound, as breezy as it is authoritative.

Diana Morrow’s biography takes us through her subject’s largely uneventful life. A secure and contented childhood in Invercargill was marred only by the advent of a severe migraine at the age of ten which, as is noted, was ‘a precursor of medical complications that would have an ongoing impact on her life and work’.  In her second decade, literature became, for Dallas, a way of negotiating personal trauma including the near-loss of her eyesight and the early death of her father. Morrow charts Dallas’s poetic and personal development, conveying both her ‘uncomfortably shy’ (by her own reckoning) nature and her resolute, stoic personality. She writes evocatively of the young poet and her beloved mother holidaying on Stewart Island after her father’s death: ‘Beautiful crimson skies and peaceful solitude helped mother and daughter through the early stages of mourning.’

Alongside the evolution of Dallas’s inner self, her progress through the wider milieu of Southland and beyond is charted. This, during an era (either side of World War II) when outlying rural areas appeared to maintain a surprisingly active literary life. There’s a telling moment, in the late 1940s, when a local reviewer for the Southland Times aligns Dallas and her work fair and square with her home turf: ‘Southland represents solidity, calmness, almost an air of nostalgia. Ruth Dallas belongs to Southland and so do her poems.’

In keeping with such an appraisal, when describing her first book, Country Road and Other Poems (1953), Dallas said she had ‘simply responded to the poetry which I felt already existed in the landscape and the people of Southland’. The notion of poetry existing within a place before the poet even arrives there is a humble and disarming one (and an approach not foreign to Māori). As well as making generous use of archival and published sources, Diana Morrow has read Dallas closely and draws out an affinity with Oriental poets whose outlook on life was ‘closer to Ruth’s than that of many European city dwellers: they saw themselves as part of a complex world in which humanity formed only one part’.

Morrow quotes Dallas’s summation of her writerly self in 1947 (aged 28) as a member of ‘what some North Island writer wittily called the “no monoliths on our hills school of South Island writers”’. There is a clarity in her poetry which is anything but detachment. The poems are warm-spirited and distilled rather than austere. She delights in the simple fact of being alive and having the gift of sight – something she never took for granted after her brush with total blindness – and an ear for language. From ‘Still Life’:

The apples whirl in their own roundness.
The plate trembles a little to contain them…

Ruth Dallas emerges from the biography as a pithy and no-nonsense commentator – witness her description of James K. Baxter (who delivered a lecture at the 1951 writers’ conference she attended) as looking like a sick boy, ‘a plant growing under a stone, lacking sun.’ Her verses can be witty and even whimsical, in a Frame-esque way (you can imagine the two friends, Dallas and Frame, firing poem-drafts at each other), yet there is also the recurrent spectre of loss and an associated depression. She could be a wry commentator on the society and its trappings, as in the playful ‘In the University Library’:

I am swallowed by a whale
Whose ribs are well furnished
With writing material, books,
A choice of coffee or tea….

You could think of Dallas as a quietly spoken, ‘more private than lonely’ (her phrase) almost-relation of Janet Frame’s. Or as a sister/girlfriend figure to place alongside another key figure in her life, Charles Brasch, with whom she worked for many years in the Landfall office. A crucial supporter as well as publisher of her work, Brasch remarked that there were no other New Zealand poems that ‘move me & haunt me as Ruth’s do’.

Ruth Dallas: A writer’s life is an exemplary biography – well-measured, sure-footed, precise, and impeccably indexed. Readers will be left with a sense that they have walked Ruth Dallas’s territory, having surveyed the backyard and road-frontage of her life. In this age of mass-media and a pervasive hyperactivity in all aspects of culture, it’s a relief to read about someone so committed to understatement, to the quiet industry of poetry-writing. Dallas’s letterbox – through which much of her ‘career in letters’ was conducted – manifests as a far more civil and far less invasive version of the ‘In-Box’ that reigns in the present era. Ostensibly, not much happens in this book – and yet it glows with a sense of friendship, intense familial relationships (Dallas shared a house for many years with her mother, ‘a beautiful, harmonious personality, and to live with her was like living with music’ and later with her niece, Joan Dutton).

Ruth Dallas is the brilliant and necessary Southern Aunt of New Zealand letters. Anyone remotely interested in the literature of Aotearoa should own Dallas’s Collected Poems and read Morrow’s account of her life.