Stephen Oliver is an Australasian or transtasman poet and voice artist, currently living in New Zealand but with close links to Australia where he lived for twenty years. He has published sixteen poetry collections, seven chapbooks, and a memoir, Unposted, Autumn Leaves/A Memoir In Essays.
Biography
The Australasian poet, Stephen Oliver, was born in Palmerston North on December 5, 1950 during the yearly family trip to visit his mother’s sister and family in Pahiatua (his mother going into labour during the journey), though his home was Wellington. His father was an atheist of Presbyterian temperament, a leading chemist and at one time the Principal of the Pharmacy College, Cambridge Terrace, Wellington, before dying at the age of 53. His mother came from a strong Irish Catholic background in Dunedin where her parents ran the City Hotel, which received many distinguished international guests, and famous for its celebrated oval bar. The disparity between his respective parents’ upbringings and backgrounds contributed to the cultural and emotional divide between his parents. Oliver was one of six children, four brothers and one sister.
As a child, he lived in Karepa St, Brooklyn-west, Wellington, a place captured in some detail in his book length poem, Intercolonial. He was first educated at the Catholic Convent School (St. Bernard’s) Taft Street, off Ohiro Road, Wellington, and the Marist Brothers Primary School in Newtown before progressing to St Patrick's College (town). Many of his teachers were untrained, and he was educated with the usual mixture of incompetence, brutality and occasional inspiration. He recalls the influence of two teachers in particular, the lay teacher, Richard Stodart and Fr. Kevin O'Donoghue his English teacher; both strongly encouraged his burgeoning interest in poetry. Upon leaving St. Pat’s, Oliver did a one-year Magazine Journalism course at Wellington Polytechnic.
He worked briefly as a copywriter at an advertising agency, and subsequently was fired for writing poems during his work hours. He then worked part-time on Wellington's Evening Post, throwing bundles of newspapers onto the backs of trucks for delivery. Oliver belonged to the bohemian element during his early days post-secondary school in Wellington, haunting the city's artistic demimonde, centred on the Duke Hotel (since demolished). He lived in Sawyers Bay, Dunedin, in the early 1970s, drawn by the inexpensive living and by strong ancestral connections covered in Unposted, Autumn Leaves / A Memoir In Essays. In Dunedin he worked as a journalist, newsreader and production voice on Radio 4XO. He was married, but briefly.
In 1975, back in Wellington, Oliver worked as morning news reader on Radio Windy, and crossed paths with the comedian John Clarke and broadcaster Brian Edwards. From the mid 70s, he moved to Whangarei employed as a morning announcer by Radio NZ, then moved to Auckland where he worked as copywriter/production voice for Radio Hauraki, and then a free-lance voice over artist. Oliver travelled extensively, including a stint on the radio ship The Voice of Peace 1540 kHz broadcasting in the Mediterranean out of Jaffa, Israel in the late ’70s. He lived mainly in Sydney, through spent three years in Melbourne, before shifting back to Sydney. He returned to New Zealand in 2006, having spent twenty years in Australia (1986-2006), settling first in Te Kuiti (where he wrote a weekly column for the Waikato Times) and a few years later moving to Hamilton, both in the North Island. To date, Stephen Oliver has written sixteen poetry collections, seven chapbooks, and one memoir.
Critical Reception
Oliver has been described as 'one of our neglected poets', despite receiving many highly positive reviews. Michael Morrisey suggested that Oliver was omitted from the 2014 collection, Essential New Zealand Poems: Facing the Empty Page given he was one of four 'difficult, confrontational poets'. Max Nemtsov (Moscow-based Russian translator and editor) noted Oliver's resistance to what Oliver called 'the Generation of '68', and the fashion in poetry created by O'Hara and Ashbery, followed by Olson, Creeley and Duncan.
Oliver has received many very positive reviews over the years. Mark Pirie, New Zealand editor and publisher of HeadworX, dedicated an issue of Broadsheet: New Zealand Poetry to Oliver's work, saying: 'Gifted with an oratorical voice and equally gifted with the qualities of true and genuine poetry, Oliver is a poet I’ve admired for two decades.' Oliver has also been the 'featured writer' in Poetry NZ, Volume 26. The Canberra critic, Nicholas Reid called Harmonic a 'tour de force' and doubted that Australasian letters would see a more important volume in the decade. Various other writers & reviewers who have supported Oliver’s poetics over the decades are Kerry Leves, Patricia Prime, Peter Goldsworthy, Robbie Coburn, and Warren Dibble, to name a few.
A number of critics have commented on Oliver's technical range and abilities, with Nicole Sprague noting his 'playful stylistic diversity' and the esteemed Australian poet, Jennifer Strauss, observing that Oliver is 'a poet confident that his craft will sustain whatever he demands of it'. Geoff Page called him 'one of the most accomplished satirists writing in Australia and New Zealand.’
In terms of theme, the Australian critic Nicholas Reid has noted Oliver's deep-rooted modernism in several places, describing Harmonic as 'a volume that takes on ... the modernist inheritance and the difficult question of Nature'. A number of critics have noted an existential anxiety in Oliver's work, what Chris Danta pointed to as a 'cosmic claustrophobia' in Deadly Pollen. And others have pointed to the central role of myth in Oliver's thinking, with Judith Rodriguez commenting that 'his dreamscape comprises the coming of the gods, the Romans, the Vikings, the Maori'.
Oliver's poems also have a social and political dimension. As Jefferson Gaskin said, 'the poems often manage to be deeply ruminative, covering such diverse and serious topics as political, social and economic reform; nuclear testing; child abuse, and even Tourette syndrome, but whatever the subject, they never lose their sense of play'. He observes that the poems 'possess a subtle power to disturb and provoke'.
Biography compiled by Nicholas Reid.
