Lauris Edmond, 1924-2000

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 33, 1 January 2000, Page 8

Lauris Edmond, 1924-2000

W. H. Oliver

When Lauris Edmond died so unexpectedly in January this year the loss was felt by a great number of people in whose lives she had played many parts. She was essentially a writer and, as a writer, a poet, but she also lived to the full in a wider range of situations as feminist and role model, listener and counsellor, writing teacher and university tutor, reader and performer, editor and anthologist, critic and reviewer, literary politician and (at least at election time) party political activist. Through all these activities she would have defined herself in terms of family and friendship. She explored these points of departure with painstaking and sometimes painful honesty both in her autobiographies and in the succession of verse collections which began in 1975 and has been completed, perhaps only for the time being, with the recent publication of Late song. Often her late start (a first volume only after she was 50) has been emphasised; more notable is the continuous flow of books throughout the following quarter century.

That achievement brought her many distinctions and recognitions which, as a public person who took pride and pleasure in her success, she accepted with both gratitude and satisfaction. There was an honorary doctorate from Massey University, where she had been an extramural student and tutor; the award of an OBE; the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship at Menton; the Commonwealth Poetry Prize; and writing fellowships at Deakin University (Geelong, Australia) and the Victoria University of Wellington. She performed at many arts festivals and reading tours both at home and overseas, and played a part in the National Library’s ‘Love is in the air’ session. Her papers have been deposited in the Alexander Turnbull Library and will become a major source for later 20th-century literary and intellectual history.

So intent was she upon poetry that it is remarkable how much time she found for other kinds of writing and also for other activities. Three of these will be well and widely remembered: readings, creative writing courses and something perhaps best called ‘communication’ face to face talking, a voluminous correspondence and a seriously overworked telephone. All this generated a torrent of unsolicited manuscripts; she found them a great burden but she took them more seriously than in her heart of hearts she knew they merited. She would have remembered the long years during which she too was writing for her desk drawer and for no other audience. And she really did believe that poetry was not an elitist but a broadly human capacity.

A host of family and friends gathered to congratulate her on her 75th birthday only a few months before her death. It was an occasion she greatly enjoyed, both in private and in public. Her capacity to flourish in both realms was remarkable; thanks to her habit of making every occasion a personal one, the distinction tended to disappear. To mark that occasion, a selection of her work, 50 poems: A celebration, was published as a birthday gift from her friends. The word ‘celebration’ had a double significance the event was a celebration of her life, and the poems a celebration of the world of people, landscapes, skies, weathers, gardens and colours she loved and so often caught memorably in a phrase and a cadence.

To look back at that volume after her death is to realise how her joy in the shapes of living was made all the more vivid by her awareness of the shadow of death, her own approaching death in her later poems and, most poignantly, the death to which she constantly recurred, that of her daughter Rachel. An early poem ‘The pear tree’, places the whole panoply of spring under that shadow:

No spring can restore to her the changes

of sun and rain, the quiver of wind in the blossom the morning’s tender sky; her sleep is unshakeable beyond all seasons. We must make alone what sense of this we can. Spring is a reckoning.

And, in a late poem celebrating her life in the house she loved overlooking Oriental Bay, ‘At Grass Street’, she anticipates her own death and, with that touch of wryness that came to her with age, acknowledges those who will follow her and love the same place, and who will

not care at all, having your own weather and trees, hills falling and finding their eternally temporary poise ... all the same, we leave best what we have truly loved, and now I turn easily away, one second nearer my death.

No one could call her approach, either to life or death, stoical: it was far too energetic for that. It was both active and accepting; she did not turn aside from anything living and growing, nor from the sharp outline death drew about it all. She used the experience and the anticipation of death to enhance her celebration of life.

Turnbull Library Record 33 (2000), 8-10