David Kinloch introduces Vincent O'Sullivan
I first came across 'Blame Vermeer' while browsing in a bookshop in Wellington. To be more accurate, my gaze was attracted by the cover of the slim volume of which it is the title poem. It shows a fragment of Vermeer's painting usually known as The Milkmaid (c.1658) and such is the pull of anything by this artist I picked it up immediately.
The sequence here enacts a pattern that has been given the rather forbidding Greek term 'ekphrasis': first the painting or work of art, then the words about it; poems about paintings. This is something I've been doing a lot of myself recently, so I was intrigued to find out how Vincent O'Sullivan would go about it.
In 1766 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing suggested that it was futile writing poetry about the visual arts because the latter have to do with the spatial aspects of a work, whereas the verbal cannot escape language's temporality. Later critics have disagreed with him and many writers, including Proust who was so famously drawn to a patch of yellow paint in Vermeer's view of Delft, have found ingenious ways round this basic difference. O'Sullivan's poem is particularly interesting, then, precisely because it raises the relationship of time to space so directly. There is a sense in which this poem is an implicit meditation on its own processes or, indeed, those involved in the creation of any art object, be it visual or verbal. This often happens with ekphrastic verse. Formally, the poem comes close to enacting the very division or difference Lessing raised. First of all the attempt to represent in words the spatial dimensions of the scene and then, in the second stanza, a determined focus upon future and past, what will happen, might have happened after, before the artist fixed the milkmaid in this specific pose, froze her in this specific act. And then the third stanza, which –,with some virtuosity – plays from one to the other, one through the other, weaving time through space and vice-versa.
Except that these categories are not watertight. No sooner has the poet begun to describe the scene than he is forced, apparently, to introduce the temporal in the reference to the children's impending sleep-over. Nothing can be frozen for long. Stillness and the peace it sometimes represents cannot be held for long before the daily round revives and ordinariness and evil and simple tragedy wash through us much as the milk pours steadily from jug into bowl. The poem touches lightly on a weighty issue: the artist's responsibility in a world where atrocities occur, and is all the more effective for being so deft. It has the merit of forcing the famously enigmatic character of Vermeer's work to confront the squalid awfulness of much that humanity has been responsible for, while preserving the painting's sense of mystery and openness to other interpretations.
This poem is in many ways typical of O'Sullivan's strengths: it has a lyric eloquence that never shies away from, often embraces, difficult sometimes philosophical subject matter and is a good introduction – as is the volume as a whole – to his work in general. O'Sullivan is one of New Zealand's most variously gifted poets, with many award-winning books of poetry and prose to his name. A critic, short story writer, novelist, playwright and influential editor he is a writer of major international stature whose work deserves to be widely read.
Vincent O'Sullivan
Blame Vermeer
A woman of thirty pours the inch or so of milk
left in a jug, sets the jug high on a shelf
inside a small cupboard because the children
from next door are to stay the night, she'll
not risk their picking at its precious glaze.
She takes her ring from beside the tap,
slips it back onto her third finger.
She hears steps on the path.
Something
will happen after every painting for a long
time yet. It may have been war,
a sudden wrenching of implacable grief,
diseases arrived from the unburied,
children clattering in only days until
they are shunted east.
And the stranger
announcing, 'There is something here,' and her hand
on the lip first then the jug's smooth curving,
it was lifted, so Jug & Woman
may have been the title again as it was and was
how many hundred times in that small
kitchen, its imagined canvas, the deluging back
of ordinariness so lovely, to what can one
compare it? And the steps always arriving.
It will happen next.
About Vincent O'Sullivan
 Vincent O'Sullivan was born in Auckland in 1937. He admits to a 'life-long conviction that Burns is the purest and finest lyric poet', but his immediate Scottish connection is limited to a great-grandmother who lived in Edinburgh for some years. He has published ten collections of poetry, as well as novels, short stories, plays, essays, and biography. Further Convictions Pending: poems 1998-2008, will be published early next year. He is co-editor of the five-volume Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, and he has edited several anthologies. He was Professor of English at Victoria University, Wellington, from 1988 to 2004.
Titles
available from SPL
Butcher & Co. (Wellington: OUP, 1977)
Brother Jonathan, Brother Kafka (Wellington: OUP, 1980)
The Butcher Papers (Auckland: OUP, 1982)
The Pilate Tapes (Auckland: OUP, 1986)
Seeing You Asked (Wellington: VUP, 1998)
Lucky Table (Wellington: VUP, 2001)
Nice Morning for It, Adam (Wellington: VUP, 2004)
Blame Vermeer (Wellington, VUP, 2007)
Related
links
New Zealand Book Council
Victoria University Press
About
David Kinloch
 David Kinloch was born and brought up in Glasgow, and holds degrees from the Universities of Glasgow and Oxford. For many years a teacher of French, he currently teaches creative writing at the University of Strathclyde. He is a past recipient of the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Award and a Scottish Arts Council Writers' Bursary. His books of poetry include Paris-Forfar (Polygon, 1994), Un Tour d'Ecosse (Carcanet, 2001) and In My Father's House (Carcanet, 2005).
Related
links
www.davidkinloch.co.uk
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