It’s striking how many of the most exciting younger poets at the moment – Xiaole Zhan, Modi Deng, Cadence Chung, Claudia Jardine – have trained as musicians at the same time as they have developed their writing. Jackson McCarthy is one of this group, too, and I wonder if it’s the discipline of music that has freed them all from the self-defeating New Zealand self-consciousness and awkwardness and inhibition around talent and craft and skill and effort that so often turns a hesitancy to speak into a conscious mangling of what could be beautiful speech. They’re not Fretful Sleepers! And part of what makes McCarthy’s Portrait – a debut collection I’ve just finished reading, and plan to re-read as many times as I can this week – so exciting and so fresh and so alive is its unembarrassed assurance in its own goodness. It swaggers! And it deserves to swagger. Making music is hard work, and the culture of music recognises effort and strain and precision in a way that what passes for reviewing here doesn’t often with literature. All of those competitions, for the players; for us listeners and viewers, less admirably, there’s the wonder of whether it’ll all come together. Watching Yunchan Lim on YouTube is a chance to revel in his brilliance; there’s also a slight thrill in imagining him messing it up. McCarthy doesn’t mess it up, but he’s unruffled either at letting us see the effort involved, the stitching and unstitching that goes into all of this performance of ease and cool. None of the tedium, in this collection, of a poet pretending it’s all just knocked together somehow despite himself. Portrait shimmers:

The yawn I pick up from his

yawn: a memory of a breath

in the surface of the dawn.

I’ve known some of these poems for a couple of years now, but reading them in new company and together as a stand-alone book brings them into a different (and flattering, and re-energising) order. Some of this is to do with musicality. The poems sound good together – they chime – and the different echoes (some, as with Auden and Ashbery, acknowledged; some, as with Manhire, unacknowledged) build to something more than their individual moments. There is the stillness, the music of the collection as the ‘space between the notes’ (the ‘small white horror’ of the ‘bones of a bird / in the grass’ my favourite). A funniness comes out, too, a kind of reckless zaniness that threatens all of that lyricism and stillness and almost – but never quite! – upends it into boyish play. I’ve thought of McCarthy from the beginning as a poet of wit. He’s also funny, quite a different thing. Some of that humour, and some of the swagger, is occasionally aloof and sometimes a little cruel. That’s a right of the young and the gifted and those with the nerve, certainly (just like striking the lacrimae rerum note), and it’s part of the pleasure, and of the wit (in “Uniform” especially). It’s also a little chilling, and a little frightening.

Portrait is interesting about men, too; in romantic ways, obviously (and winningly), but in other ways as well. I was about to write in ‘masculinity’, but that sounds too pious and academic and worthy. I just mean in things manly: the hang of t-shirts, certain tones of voice, ways of being social (and anti-social). Lots of women poets write interestingly about how women relate to other women, but it’s a topic men seem to find harder to approach about other men with the honesty of their curiosity intact. Vincent O’Sullivan ruined some of his most moving poems by getting self-conscious half-way through and deliberately hamming things up to avoid a real confrontation with his own intensities. O’Sullivan’s titles sound so often – it frustrates me no end – like a concert pianist banging his fists down on the keys after playing Chopin’s Études just to show he wasn’t taken in by the show. ‘Trakl, old mate’, ‘Nice morning for it, Adam’, ‘The trouble with reading, frankly’, ‘Disciples, frankly’, ‘Blame Vermeer’. It’s so dispiriting. The comparison might seem odd but, reading Portrait, I kept thinking of O’Sullivan in the moments of his I love best. McCarthy and O’Sullivan are both, in their different ways, Catholic Auckland, both prickly, smart, lyrical, writerly, measured, cagey. McCarthy’s ways of watching men, and thinking about men, thinking about the homosocial, track O’Sullivan’s without the latter’s self-sabotage and good-keen-mannerisms. That’s to do with history and generation, surely; but there’s a shared stance. The choice of Max Oettli’s Silver Star as a cover image (an inspired piece of design) suggests something of this roving, energetic, restless observation.

I love also McCarthy’s willingness to think about tradition as something to be evoked and played with and followed – Auden, Glück (ganz glücklich!), Ashbery, all in the universal dance. And I appreciate very much his willingness to think in public and in art being both Māori and Pākehā, and about the intersecting and interlocking lines of art, tradition, story and meaning being inseparable there. It’s a quietly determined stance and one that, without much fanfare, issues some challenges to readers and to critics. As it should.

What next? The (considerable) charm and beauty of this as a debut lies, for me, in its sense of order, of balance, of music. The contrast between a poised form and a disordered content is a constant, and does fine work. What would happen were the poet next to really allow himself ‘down the streets’ of his mind to ‘just look / at the people’s sudden faces’? McCarthy has shown he can write leggierio; can he let in some formal mess and disorder con brio? Is there room for affirmation through doubt? A few of the poems here felt, to me, a little too poised, a little too sure of their performance. ‘The Earth’ comes close to a kind of unpleasant jeering, closing itself and turning away from the sacred (or from me as a reader and my hopes to know the sacred, anyway). What of the encounter with a ‘sacred being’ that Auden puts at the heart of creation in ‘Making, Knowing, Judging’? ‘It may be noble or something unmentionable in a drawing room, it may be anything it likes on condition, but this condition is absolute, that it arouse awe’: there’s plenty of wonder in Portrait but, to my ears, it’s not a collection ready (yet) to let ‘awe’ in fully. That’s for what’s to come, I hope.

And that’s an early judgement from an early setting of readings; already I’m doubting myself. And the poems ask to be read again. They’re at work in the memory and in the ear.

An editorial gripe. Reality must be local and special at the point where we pick up the traces. That includes our bottoms. Someone at Auckland University Press ought to have insisted that the ‘ass’ in ‘dress pants’, the curving ‘ass’ in ‘the night / full of stars’ and the ‘beautiful white ass’ in ‘Santa Monica’ be corrected to arses. All of my Orsmans are at work and so I’m having to rely on Deverson and Kennedy’s much less charming New Zealand Oxford Dictionary, but even they are clear on the matter. Some editor couldn’t be arsed. They should of.