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The Best of Men Declines: Post-nationalism in the Poetry of Vincent O’Sullivan

8 November 2007

Byline:	Dr Luke Strongman (Open Polytechnic of New Zealand)
Source:	Humanities Research Network

A paper given at Transformations '07: Composing the nation: ideas, peoples, histories, languages, cultures, economies, the Congress of Te Whāinga Aronui The Council for the Humanities (VUW, Wellington, 27-28 August 2007).

In this paper (1), Vincent O'Sullivan's engagement with literary theory and what is termed a post-national engagement with history will be examined in aspects of his poetry from the sequence of volumes beginning with the Montana winner, Seeing You Asked (1998), continued with Lucky Table (2001, a Montana runner-up), and the Montana winning, Nice Morning For It, Adam (2004). The recent poetry volume, Blame Vermeer (2007) will also considered within this rubric.

Such an undertaking will inevitably reflect continuities and discontinuities in the historical development of the thematical concerns of O'Sullivan's poetry. The main continuities are a reaffirmation that as K. O. Arvidson claimed in 1983: '[O'Sullivans] is a poetry of ideas' and a reassessment of O'Sullivan's use of irony as a poetic and teleological device (2). The discontinuities reflect a shift, which is largely that of context, from O'Sullivan's connotation of the minutiae of small-town institutions in his poetry to a poetical lexicon that, for a decade at least, has been more overtly compatible with literary theory. In this respect O'Sullivan's poetry since the 1990s articulates a form of post-nationalism which problematises the concept of unity and the experience of time as a conditioner of local experience. Through his poetry, O'Sullivan seeks on the one hand to resist a hegemony that derives from unselfreflexive examinations of situatedness in place that might otherwise revise and critique the postnational unified subject, and on the other hand a critique is entered into in his poetry of a linguistic relativism that is politically ineffective in conveying the particularities of relatedness to place and others, which might imagine difference from the historical ideologies of late-capitalism, which seek to contain it.

O'Sullivan's most recent book of verse, Blame Vermeer, brokers a consideration of European art within an aesthetic of national habitation expressed through concepts of temporal expansion and finitude. Co-jointly with a post-modern levity towards historical fixedness, the sense of time engendered in this work refers to the Judeo-Christian continuum. There is a tension established in Blame Vermeer between sacred and secular time expressed in the particularities of New Zealand life considered through the Claude glass of European art. For example, the new historist's concern for space and context and a rueful postmodern levity towards time is expressed in the poem 'Note from Comedown Castle' while the impressionists' preoccupation with moment is examined in, "Avoiding the Volcano" and "Don't forget his Milo". Both poems fuse a European painterly aesthetic with the belated reflection of the Antipodean intellectual: "You may live a hundred years and regret a lot, yet nothing will alter this: the time/the stars were close enough to touch."(3)

In an O'Sullivan's poem, searching for the meaningful referent amid the bricolage of global iconography tends to produce a diffusion of the sources from which individual claims to poetical specificity might come; this is a salient feature of a lexicon of cultural diversity. Sometimes, this may be registered as an expression of ordinary meaning within the larger anxiety of globalisation. As Anna Jackson puts it, "the need to represent a 'common place' has been overtaken by an emphasis on the commonplace."(4) I argue not only the obvious point that transnational cultural conditions and transtemporal literary techniques have worked towards displacing the essentialisms of nationalism in O'Sullivan's poetical form, but that this has also meant that the revised lexicon of globalised poetical references appears, but perhaps no more than appears, to offer more recognition to the forces which shape the cultural moment.

Two dissimilar tensions are traceable in contemporary New Zealand poetry, which may claim to articulate their own kinds of difference. The first of these (which itself is becoming increasingly seen as a leftist historical view) is the argument following Debord and Buadrillard that authentic cultural production is commodified before it is experienced and sold back to society as image: It could be argued that the open form poets such as Wedde and Manhire, Leggot; poststructuralists and concrete poets are all informed by an awareness of this proposition. The second influence is that of the local within the global, the tendency of subjectivity experienced in contemporary consumerist culture to oscillate between a temporary ambiguation/disambiguation the culture of the sign only to return the interpreter to the anesthetised banality of a globalised materialism. The tension that these two tendencies express in the linguistic field of New Zealand poetry may function to obscure the specific and meaningful idiosyncrasies and moods of experience and sensitivities to place, circumstance and feeling that have been historically relevant to the fact of nationality expressed by New Zealand poets. One can agree with Patrick Evans that "New Zealand] literary culture has always been constructed by global contexts and always superficially connected to its environment as a result."(5) The problem is one of emphasis. I would argue that Evans's operative verb 'constructed' be replaced by 'informed' as there is a sense in which the cultural nationalists were specifically exclusive of outside geographical influences. Secondly, modernism has always advocated more than a superficial engagement with the environment, although Evans is correct of course to claim that the language of literature is primarily representational.

O'Sullivan has retained a proclivity of mood in his poetry with regard to relationship and place that critiques the possibility of an overarching national metanarrative. O'Sullivan has been preoccupied in his poetry with the analysis and presentation of certain kinds of emotional typography in contemporary experience that eclipses geographical determinism and also resists the surficial monetarist jargon of globalisation. By the 1990s O'Sullivan had developed an ironic and satirical voice that encompasses and delineates local referents as well as internationalisms. As early as 1976 O'Sullivan argued that:

A man who lives in this country today does not generally have to come to terms with the land. . . .[n]ot man and the land, but man in a welfare state society, man in love, man in the flow of a larger world around him, are the concerns of most of our poets since 1950. . . . [t]he look of New Zealand, the feel of it, must continue to furnish the staple of much impulse, to serve as the mould where much feeling settles most effectively. To go that one step farther, and claim that only in what is recognizably New Zealand can valid poetry begin, has come to be more than a little narcissistic.(6)

Here O'Sullivan expresses a desire to write out from underneath a cliché of cultural nationalism. The point is than in his or her self-absorption, the quest for the boundaries of the unified subject, the cultural nationalist tended to see nothing but him or herself. By contrast, as Stuart Murray claimed in 1993, O'Sullivan's poetry 'points to a pluralism' that is often not (often) available in New Zealand culture which, at times, has lead O'Sullivan to express his annoyance with a culture which 'lapses into limitation.'(7) These annoyances are perhaps most obviously noted in O'Sullivan's introduction to the second edition of his An Anthology of Twentieth Century New Zealand Poetry, in which he observes: '[a] decline in the standards and expression of criticism, an over eagerness to find print, and the sterile energies of faction.'(8) O'Sullivan's claim for a literature metamorphosing in ideology in the mid seventies perhaps not surprisingly is consistent with the views that he expresses about identity in New Zealand writing his interview with Alan Riach in the early nineties.(9)

There is a certain double-edged quality to O'Sullivan's writing, a concern with lived experience that interrogates a Lockean belief in knowledge being that which is primarily available to the senses combined with an interest in theory of the Russian formalist derivation which interpellates the position of the writer in relationship to his art. While his oeuvre is not solely informed by subjective humanism, O'Sullivan nevertheless strongly resists the view expressed by Jonathan Lamb that globalisation (in cultural production) represents: '[d]iversion of public concern from questions of human suffering to questions of expense and good accounting.'(10) O'Sullivan's poetical discourse has thus far remained thematically impervious to the pressures and exigencies of economics.

O'Sullivan's poetic writing style explores a kind of figurative naiveté that also spills over into a heady satire, tempered by a kind of religiosity. Many of O'Sullivan's poems are morality plays which, though a series of short shocks--be they moral or more concrete as effects of poetry--expose the reader to a sense of heightened awareness of self in relation to objects and others, uncovering both beauty and pretension, which adjusts the reader to O'Sullivan's teasing-out of levels of moral comfort and feelings of being ill-at-ease, or in the delineation of linguistic occasions when introspection is required of subjectivity in relation to the transitive moment. As Elizabeth Caffin put in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature: For O'Sullivan poetry [is] a deliberate activity implying a critical and interpretive approach to experience, working towards a moral vision through metaphor and myth.(11) While O'Sullivan's use of metaphor and myth explores the contours a progressively more cerebral approach since the sequence of poetry volumes beginning with Seeing You Asked in 1998 O'Sullivan refuses to be subsumed with any overarching philosophical rubric, refuting the frequently two-dimensional quality of theory. His poems involve open-ended working out of problems of mind and body, relationship and literary style, but more than this they examine ways of being and thinking, that refuse to be tied down to any one position. While O'Sullivan's poetry engages with what he sees as the practical consequences of theory and philosophy, his work is not contained by any one movement or approach, but compliments, comments on, and revises philosophical ideas within the aesthetic 'discussion' of the writer's art. As he puts it in the recent short-story collection Pictures by Goya (2006): 'theories are for those outside, isn't that so? Theory is always a strategy to possess. If you're there, why bother?'(12) O'Sullivan raises the question, what is on the other side of theory? Literary theory is engaged with in his work as a dialectical reference point.

For example, the poststructuralists disposition that no single reading of a writers work is definitive, that language always leaves the trace of the absent, is explored in the last stanza of the poem 'Plato among the cockatoos, from Lucky Table (2001). As Derrida puts it: ' . . . There has to be the possibility of someone's still arriving; there has to be an arrivant, and consequently the table - the contents or the table of the community - has to mark an empty place for someone absolutely indeterminate, for an arrivant . . . .'(13) Plato's idealistic belief in the purity of the forms (often much reduced in the popular use of the phrase 'platonic') is satirised in the context of the poem where the attainment of the absolute would necessarily mean the absolving of the subject of the poem: 'The Good and the Beautiful'/ chalked on an empty cage.(14)

That O'Sullivan's writing also entertains a Bahktinian dialogic relationship with theory is evidenced in O'Sullivan's poetry from the late nineties. In a similar manner to the Geneva school of critics who posited a unity of consciousness between reader text and author, Bahktin figures in O'Sullivan's work as the consequence of the particular way in which an O'Sullivan's poem typically negotiates a position between author text and reader. In an O'Sullivan poem the reader is orientated in two directions. Firstly, the reader figures as a witness or ally to a particular poetic orientation, problem, or effect established by the construction of the author and secondly with respect to the object of the poetic intent in which the reader is a participant who is cajoled, rewarded, or influenced by the intonation of the poem.

For example, in 'The Boy who Invented Pastiche,' from the collection Nice Morning for it Adam, the postmodern tenet of pastiche, the assemblage of different motifs in the present from past history, is satirised in the Horatian manner:

The Roman poet fiddled his quill,
pressed on expensive parchment
lines he had mulled between the Senate
and the caged African beasts.
Humanity wasn't up to much, he said,
sweetly enough to make it sing(15)

If the earlier poetry O'Sullivan draws on examples of rhetorical poets--Dylan Thomas, Yeats, and Baudelaire - to create not so much a developing poetical persona as a way of seeing, as David Dowling put it(16), the later poetry explores the transition between structuralist and poststructuralist thinking. The two major themes which Dowling had identified of the earlier poetry - interaction with the environment and philosophical pilgrimage - what Dowling describes as "intriguing but totally opaque imagery" which is more consistent with a formalist approach, positing as it does a system of cultural referents outside the mechanism of the poem, have developed into a poetic that critiques the current vogue of poststructuralism.(17)

O'Sullivan, as a poet is questioning of a postmodern domain that celebrates intertextuality, motif, pastiche, nostalgia, self-reflexivity and satire and resistant also to the lexicon of consumerism that informs the cultural nomenclature of poststructuralist consumer-culture's globalised discourse. The subject of O'Sullivan's poetry is frequently philosophy and philosophers themselves or writers and writing itself: Plato, Wittgenstein, Buddha, Valery, Stevens, Schr'dinger, Brecht, Rilke, Green, Hemingway and Dante all occur as sources of reference and identity in O'Sullivan's poetry since the early 1990s. Combined with these are the references to European artists of Blame Vermeer. The geographies in his poetry are as wide-ranging as China, U.S.A., England, South America, and France, Germany, Holland, Spain.

Theory and experience intermix and interweave in O'Sullivan's poetry according to shifting patterns and tonalities of relationships and meanings. Consider, for example, 'The child in the gardens: winter' and 'Still waiting are we' from Nice Morning for it Adam. The former has a parallel with Thomas Hardy's 'Rain on a Grave' (1913) and the latter updates the morbid self- reflexivity of 'Overlooking the River Stour.' Both poems exhibit the elegiac tradition of Hardy with sprung enjambments and mixture of dactylic and anapestic trimeter:

How sudden this entering the fallen
gardens for the first time to feel the blisters
of the world's father as his own hand
does..(18)
……………………
It is so pointless, they will tell you,
for hours at a time to watch the poplar
lengthen across the lawn, so the cold
inside the shadow and the warmth of the tree
still blazed in six o'clock's flare up
descant each to each . . .(19)

These are poems expressive of local colour and a regionalism that suggest interplay between the Wairarapa and Hardy's Wessex. The sense of place and time they engender are transportable between New Zealand and Europe. There too, is an empathetic glancing back, no doubt, for the kind of revision of 'Remembering Mrs Hardy' of Seeing You Asked: 'And the miles back, the unending red miles / Of what I let myself in for'.(20)

'Still Waiting are we' enacts a nostalgic swapping of codes between post-colonial New Zealand and Edwardian England. However, the intensely private nature of the poetry defies the irreverence of postcolonial displacement. The poems are not simple reflections of imperial stylistic motif but invoke an idiosyncratic nostalgic regard that enjoins the possibility of romantic transplantation in a postcolonial context. More than this they achieve the same emotional tone common to both eras, the one Edwardian the other postcolonial. For both this emotional tone is fashioned out of painful recognitions of troubled pasts: for Hardy forces of mercantilism on artistic temperament and for O'Sullivan search for the miraculous that will redeem the everyday.(21) However, this sense of transportability is an effect rather than a theme of the poem. More than this, the two poems locate a post-Marxian sense of subjectivity that interpolates the experience of 'pure moment' that the lexicon of capitalism seeks to commidify and transform.

However, 'The child in the Garden: Winter' also intertextualises Anna Karenina (1887): 'the early stars can't hurt us, they are further than the trains we hear on the clearest of nights.'(22) This is characteristic O'Sullivan irony. The effect of the pastiche of Tolstoy and Hardy is to provide a fusion of subjective longing in the examination of emotional tone, a postmodern rendering at the intersection of the romanticist and modernist dilemma but here played out in terms of human relationships rather than landscape. Like Colin McCahon's Baxter referencing painting, 'A Candle in a Dark Room,' there is the glow of illumination amid the darkness of winter and moral examination in O'Sullivan's writing; sometimes expressed as a symbolism of wholesome emptiness or of poignant silences.

O'Sullivan's poetry is also replete with different areas of accent and weighting, some stylistic some more philosophical in import and implication. In novelist, Edith';s Wharton's sense of there being two ways to caste light--to be the flame or the mirror that reflects it--O'Sullivan subjects and muses are practitioners not procrastinators and the readers perceptions are focused in the heightened sense of drama that follows from ethical dilemma. The moment of 'ethical exposure' is often assigned an aesthetic value--an emotional tone--for example, the feeling of sadness following the inevitable break-up of an affair as related in 'Letting Go' from Lucky Table: 'Shall I ever get used to what isn';t here?'.(23)

In an O'Sullivan short story or poem a moral tone in is given an aesthetic value that equates to its punitive or illuminative function within the poem or story. However, it is not just ontological truths that O'Sullivan's poetry wishes to reveal, which has given cause for Anna Jackson to write: 'There is a kind of luminous spirituality about O'Sullivan's poetry, that long after you have read the poems, continues to reside in the objects or situations the poems describe.'(24) Jackson's recognition of a Rilkean object-clarity or perhaps prosopopeia in O'Sullivan's poetry is nicely observed. For example, 'Moving In, 'May the house/ and ourselves reside in his mind/as he does in ours . . .enclosing his space and ours.(25) Here, there is a negotiation of domestic space in memory, the addressor and addressee of the poem are parted, together perhaps only in each other's thoughts, their division from one-another is echoed by the poem's division between lingering sentiment and the description of object in the recognition of a place where there no-longer is intimacy.

The Michael Ondaatje-like 'Open home' manages to situate personal memoir in a resonantly post-colonial context, articulating nostalgia constituted in the mixture of newness and leaving that constantly informs the imagination of the diasporic postcolonial critic. This poem is also an articulation of a wider perception that in contemporary patterns of discursive self-reflexive identity, an ethical turn in which the political identity of a post-colonial critic can be the subject of his or her own discipline, the 'place of memory' must be abandoned as it becomes particularised: 'That room, this palace of ghosts./ Heels cross its uncarpeted boards'.(26)

The reader imagines that the colonial house is on the market and the moment of liberation for its owner, of decolonisation, of release, is a feeling consigned to the past yet lingers in memory. As Kwame Appiah has put it, 'Even in domains like religion where instrumental reason would recognize that the market has at best an ambiguous place, modernity has turned every element of the real into a sign, and the sign reads 'for sale.'(27) 'Open home' asks, where is the place of memory in such transitoriness? Furthermore the normative component of this politics of memory is premised on a pattern of consumption, which consigns the affect of local memory to the unconscious.

This feeling of truth as something detached from history and dependent on the observer is echoed in terms of a neo-classical nostalgia for the golden era of Greece in 'Come the rainy day'; and its imagery of Medea. The poem juxtaposes the impassioned emptiness of Medea's senseless slaughter of her children with the emptiness of symbol in the present day -- the coin that has no shared value, token that doesn't ring in the present context - the banality of a world stripped of ideology. Elizabeth Caffin explains the issue of classical mythologizing in O'Sullivan's poetry thus:

He [O'Sullivan] has consistently been drawn to myth as a profound explanatory pattern of human existence shared with a wide community past and present. This early work returns again and again to classical mythology, rewriting old stories, adapting them to present situations, siting them in contemporary Mediterranean landscapes. By implication, New Zealand is a land without myth, for it appears rarely in these poems; though he does increasingly attempt to write myths-or anti-myths-for that less heroic civilization too.(28)

The subtle mythologizing of New Zealand that O'Sullivan entertains in his poetry is not merely that of an uncannily familiar terrain of classical allusion neither is it the complete invocation of a Don Quixotean regionalism but also one of 'old fashioned' socio-political comment in a contemporary context. Whereas figures of antiquity had known and lived the past (their ontology was one of inhabitation) those of the modern day are preoccupied primarily with owning it. Problems arise for people when events of the past render them unable to live fully in the present-this is one source of myth in the sense of 'inherited structures of meaning.'(29) O'Sullivan highlights such problems with his engagement with the themes of classical antiquity.

This writerly quality, in which the open-form is expressed in both structure and semantics is evident in poems such as 'Author's Bluff, and in the Manhiresque, 'Child playing drafts,''Which do you want?' a voice says./ Night and day, that's all.(30) Stanley Fish's reader-response theory in which the reader is responsible for the interpretation of the writing rather than the author is parodied in 'Lover Response Theory': 'It';s easier with books,/ I say, though more true of love.(31) The semantic layering in an O'Sullivan poem, here of people and texts, is nevertheless a kind of postmodern turn: a kind of oscillation through a rexamination of modern and romantic ideas. This ambivalence is played out also, for example, in the contemplation of the sublime in 'The best of men declines': 'Standing on a ridge with the wind indifferent,/ as we always knew, whether man or rock / stood trivially there, for the moment'(32)

The movement forward through the text of the stories and poems is impelled by a kind of search for the miraculous in everyday things, a deeply romantic impulse. Yet there is also reason in O'Sullivan's writing that holds his reflection and reflexivity at a distance, the Keatsian 'negative capability' which allows the reader to interpret O'Sullivan's character's thought and actions at an angle and appreciate their emotional tone in the story or poem as an aesthetic device.

O'Sullivan holds experience up for contemplation in his prose and poetry with a critic's reserve and a novelist's bravado. His writing frequently totters on the edge of the romantic impulse but its quest is for a kind of enlightened ideal, is if to say mankind's natural condition is romantic but the individual can long for order, surety, suffer moments of inspired clarity, perhaps similar to Rousseau's deism, the idea of inner light invested in the incarnate world. In 'Lexicographer' brief' this light is shed on an aesthetical appreciation of the lexicographer whose instantiation in the poem registers shifts between structuralist and poststructuralist meaning, between the symbol and the signifier and signified: 'Everything stands on the brimming shadow/ of its name.'

O'Sullivan's examination of antifoundationism is apparent in Lexicographer's brief. The Derridean sense that language inescapably undermines meanings in the very process of making such meanings possible is explored in Lexographer Brief. The poem suggests that being human is subject to external forces. The concept of signifier and signified is expounded in the first eleven lines of the poem in which the reader is made to participate in a postructuralist game in order to attempt to master the play of signifieds. However the poet's ultimate purpose is ironic in eliding the structure of language within the description of the proto-human subject of the lexographer.

There too in Lexicographer's brief, O'Sullivan proposes the shift from structuralist to poststructuralist thinking. If the poem divests the writing subject of operative agency, removing the purposeful human agent into a location by the end of the poem, wherein the differential elements and codes of a systematic langue point to a particular signifying product, the idea of linguistic centre in turn is undermined in which removes the sense of controlling agency in the poem. Reading 'Lexicographer' brief becomes an act of interpreting an undecidable play of purely relational elements. This is reinforced in lines nine to eleven where the 'centre' of the poem is configured as 'noon.' However, by the end of the poem, lines nine to twenty, O'Sullivan acknowledges that such intellectualism involves a willing suspension of the determinants of physical location, whilst using the representation of the linguistic elements as the poem's subject, a position that is later affirmed at the poem's conclusion. The irony being that there is a residual humanism in O'Sullivan's approach that is compatible with a structuralist but uncertain with a poststructuralist position.

Similarly, the private language argument enters O'Sullivan's poetry in 'Imagine, Mr Wittgenstein' of Seeing You Asked: I am matching the edges of what almost was, / what is' (33) The private language argument conceives that a language in the abstract which unintelligible to anyone but its original user is impossible. The reason for this is that such a so-called language would, necessarily, be unintelligible to its creator also as he or she would be unable to establish meanings for its nomenal signs. There would be no sense in such a private language in which the relationship between signifier and signified in such a language would be independantly verifiable. In O'Sullivan's poem, Wittgenstein is perpetually enunciating words at the periphery of dissemination, he is caught up in the contemplation of the play of meaning in endless defferal of meaning at the point of articulation. O'Sullivan's poem may also point to a desire, however, to return to an 'adamic language' in the sense of Jacob Bohme in which each object has a name which identifies it and it is the task of the poet as philologist to uncover such names.

This over-riding concern with language exploration echoes Stuart Murray's statement in 1993 that there is, 'potential for 'fulfilment' in O'Sullivan's poetry rather than consolidation.'(34) Again, it is the pursuit of a religiosity that will redeem the everyday; or in writerly terms an ability to observe and describe the division between social event and inner feeling that is extra-ordinary in its discrimination and facility. However this sense of fulfilment occurs at an individual level with the reader, it is still dependent on the representation of the social act in the poem whose description is necessarily incomplete. Andrew Johnston has suggested that:

Vincent O'Sullivan as poet reminds one of nothing so much as an antipodean Marist or Jesuit; with his trenchant mix of philosophical erudition and vernacular ease, he comes across as the defrocked priest of New Zealand literature. His poems display an irreverence that shades into reverence: God is spoken of with fondness and slight regret, as if O'Sullivan is remembering a character who belongs to a previous book (which, he might say, is what God is).(35)

I would like to suggest that O'Sullivan's poetry has for a decade been flexible enough to be read in terms of a post-nationalist critique which plays thematic counter-point to the unifying rigidities of theologism much as it critiques the possibility of a unified subject. This interlocution of literary theory in its various forms in O'Sullivan's poetry licenses a form of post-nationalism in which O'Sullivan which seeks to avoid both the essentialism and relativism, that would contain and render ineffectual his poetical re-imaginings of place, language and relationships. O'Sullivan's poetic in general has challenged the demarcation that separates the containment of meaning within his writing and the establishment of a framework for making meaning within New Zealand culture-writing and culture can be understood as a reflexive process that both inform and co-create one another in his work. The satirical poems of the past fifteen years are about the examination of ethics of place and circumstance and particular kinds of aesthetic and theoretical experience in language. O'Sullivan's oeuvre continues to present an alertness to the cultural sensitivities of a post-nationalism that is demarcated as much by a proclivity of emotional tone and a license to transcend local history in the articulation of the form and content of the poem as by avoidance of a particular linguistic register of finitude located wholly in the present.

Endnotes
1) I am grateful to Mark Williams for reading an earlier version of this paper article.
2) Arvidson, K. O.'Curnow, Stead and O'Sullivan: 'Major Sensibilities in NZ Poetry'. JNZL (Wellington: Department of English, Victoria University, 1983), p.47.
3) Vincent O'Sullivan. ';Don't forget his Milo' in Blame Vermeer (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2007), p. 66.
4) Anna Jackson. 'The Approach of the Sublime in New Zealand Poetry' in Writing at the Edge of the Universe. (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2004). P. 141
5) Patrick Evans. 'On Originality: No Earth Tones' in Writing at the Edge of the Universe. (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2004). P. 68.
6) Vincent O'Sullivan. An Anthology of Twentieth Century New Zealand Poetry, 2nd edn. (Oxford University Press, Wellington, 1976). P. xxv.
7) Stuart Murray. Vincent O'Sullivan: Working with the Masks' CRNLE Reviews Journal. 2. (1993). P. 117.
8) Vincent O'Sullivan. An Anthology of Twentieth Century New Zealand Poetry, 2nd edn. (Oxford University Press, Wellington, 1976). P. xxix.
9) E. Alley & M. Williams. (Eds.). In the Same Room. Conversations with New Zealand writers. (Auckland; Auckland Univ Press, 1992), p. 201
10) Jonathan Lamb. 'The New Zealand Sublime'Meanjin 49 (4) Summer. (1990). P. 664.
11) Elizabeth Caffin. 'Poetry: 1945-1990s'. The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English. (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1998) P. 493.
12) Vincent O'Sullivan. Pictures by Goya and other stories. (Auckland, Penguin: 2006), p. 36
13) Jacques Derrida. 'I Have a Taste for the Secret', in Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), p. 30-2.
14) Vincent O'Sullivan. Lucky Table. (Wellington, Victoria University Press, 2001), p.41.
15) Vincent O'Sullivan. 'The boy who invented pastiche' Nice Morning for it Adam. (Victoria University Press, 2004). p. 73. l.13-24.
16) David Dowling. 'The Poetry of Vincent O'Sullivan'. Landfall. Vol. 35. Dec 1981. P. 438
17) David Dowling. 'The Poetry of Vincent O'Sullivan'. Landfall. Vol. 35. Dec 1981. P. 438
18) O'Sullivan, Vincent. 'Child in the gardens: Winter'. Nice Morning for it Adam. Victoria Universitry Press: Wellington, 2004. p.11. l. 1-10.
19) O'Sullivan, Vincent. 'Still waiting, are we? 'Nice Morning for it Adam. Victoria Universitry Press: Wellington, 2004. p.78. l. 1-6.
20) O'Sullivan, Vincent. 'Remembering Mrs Hardy' Seeing You Asked. Victoria University Press: Wellington, 1999.
21) O'Sullivan first explored this theme of the miraculous in his magical realist novella Miracle, published in 1976.
22) Vincent O'Sullivan. 'Child in the gardens: Winter'. Nice Morning for it Adam. p.11. l 13-15.
23) Vincent O'Sullivan. 'Letting Go'. Lucky Table. (Victoria University Press: Wellington), 2001. P. 43. l.9-16.
24) Anna Jackson. Backcover. In Vincent O'Sullivan, Nice Morning For It Adam. Victoria Universitry Press: Wellington, 2004.
25) Vincent O'Sullivan. 'Moving In.' Nice Morning for it Adam. p.11. l 13-15.
26) Vincent O'Sullivan.'Open home', in Nice Morning For It Adam. Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2005. P. 55.
27) Kwame Anthony Appiah. 'Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?. In Padmini Mongia. Contemporary Postcolonial Theory. Arnold: New York, 1996. Pp. 60-61.
28) Elizabeth Caffin. 'Poetry: 1945-1990s. The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English. (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1998) P. 469.
29) Jenny Bornholdt, Gregory O'Brien, and Mark Williams. Intoduction. An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1997. p. xxii.
30) Vincent O'Sullivan. Child playing drafts.. Nice Morning for it Adam. p.23.
31) Vincent O'Sullivan. Lover Response Theory.. Seeing You Asked. Victoria University Press: Wellington, 1999. p. 64
32) Vincent O'Sullivan. The best of men declines.' Nice Morning for it Adam. p.16.
33) Vincent O'Sullivan. Imagine, Mr Wittgenstein.. Seeing You Asked. p.56.
34) Stuart Murray. CRNLE Reviews Journal 2. 1993. P.118.
35) Andrew Johnston. 'Vincent O'Sullivan, Seeing You asked; Believers to the Bright Coast.' Landfall 197. Autumn 1999. Pp. 120-121.