Most portraits of Ruth Dallas (born Ruth Mumford, 1919–2008) are taken from her left-hand side. Whether requested by the sitter or unconsciously adopted, this vantage point either obscures or minimises Dallas’s glass eye. Diana Morrow’s recently published A Writer’s Life, her captivating biography of Dallas—the first comprehensive study of “the Southern Woman of New Zealand letters”— gives it to us straight, painting a life as it was lived: bright-eyed, attentive, compassionate, suffering, productive, quietist.
The life flows, as most do, from beginning to end. Here, it is broken into roughly decadal segments. Morrow opens with family history, forebears, childhood: simple but emotionally rich lives, marred by tragedies and illness; the indelible imprint of strong women. Dallas began writing when she was eight years old. Poems came, unbidden, like crocuses. And they kept on coming.
The Book of Ruth runs something like this: poems begat poems begat friendships begat poems. During World War II, Dallas was engaged (the fiancé returned, but not to her), deeply depressed and undertook rural and clerical war work. She read voraciously, lost faith in Christianity, began studying Buddhism and kept writing poems. In 1947, Dallas adopted her maternal grandmother’s surname as a pseudonym. Without any interest in self-promotion, she quickly secured a place in New Zealand’s post-war canon.
She befriended Charles Brasch, founder and editor of Landfall, who became mentor, advocate, employer and enduring friend. Until her death, Dallas helped contour the national imagination through contributions to Landfall (both as author and editorial assistant to Brasch), the School Publications series, children’s fiction and her prolific publication of poetry. Dallas accumulated many honours in her lifetime and, out of the public eye, nurtured friends and family members through periods of ill-health. From this material, Morrow has produced a beautiful, measured biography, brimming with detail and empathy, in which no part of Dallas’s life is treated as less worthy of attention than any other.
While the initial chapters draw heavily on Dallas’s autobiography, Curved Horizon, Morrow’s narrative is leavened with extensive archival research. Dallas’s writing notebooks and correspondence were particularly fertile. Her complex friendship with Brasch is illustrated through delicious, maddening quotes from their letters. Brasch could also be callous, privately lampooning the appearance, lack of education and poor diction of the “strangely countrified uneducated speech” of Dallas, who he called a “dull Southland pudding”.
However, the select bibliography is mostly limited to New Zealand literature. A Writer’s Life would have benefited from wider-ranging engagement with postcolonial studies, children’s literature and twentieth-century women’s writing. Such literature may have encouraged Morrow to delve into the work of Dallas’s “old friend” Po Chü-I (today usually rendered Bai Juyi), the Tang dynasty poet-politician who influenced her so profoundly. There is fairly light-touch analysis of Buddhist traditions. It seems likely that Dallas became acquainted with Bai Juyi through Arthur Waley’s translations, available from a popular 1941 collection. This could surely have been tested through public library catalogues.
Still, the work feels intimate (throughout, Dallas is ‘Ruth’), without lacking critical distance. Alive to the ‘extreme thrift’ and talent required for a woman to establish a writing career in post-war New Zealand, Morrow is also highly attuned to other elements of Dallas’s private self: her physical body. In 1935, just shy of her 16th birthday, Dallas’s right eye was surgically removed to restore her troubled vision. Morrow consistently shows what Dallas herself had made clear: she never “fully recovered from [her] delight at being able to see, or from wonder at the world”, hyper-aware of its contingency. This harrowing experience heightened her desire to write (already as natural as breathing), to annotate and celebrate the natural world. Through Morrow’s study, we meet both the autodidact and the natural talent, the “helpful, unassuming woman next door” and “distinguished literary figure”. No brawls or love affairs, nor even her fair share of ego, but a cardiganed, considerate woman, utterly devoted to her vocation: the music of words.
The analysis of Dallas’s writing and its reception is one of Morrow’s strengths. She contrasts Dallas as writer of verse (romantic nature-lover) and prose (“critical realist” mode), whose unheimlich short stories expose the darkness in the land of milk, wool and honey. Scything thistles all over the place, Morrow defends Dallas from misogyny, ageism and miscellaneous other prejudices, wherever they crop up. She corrects errors and misinterpretations with judicious excerpts and calm retorts. But Morrow occasionally verges on overprotective, unwilling to probe deeper.
The book’s greatest anti-climaxes concern sex and succession. When Dallas asks Brasch whether his romantic song cycle was about her, the bathos comes not with Brasch’s negation, but Morrow’s vexing refusal to speculate. Acknowledging that this exchange poses “several unanswerable questions” regarding unrequited love, Morrow casually mentions that “this might explain the [five-year] gap in her writer’s notebooks”, quoting Dallas on the need to have “a big burn up” of her papers before she died.
Even if she declined to venture beyond the documentary record, Morrow ought to have explored the secondary questions: Why might Dallas have wanted to erase the complexity of this friendship from the historical record? Why was she so reluctant to be seen? Whatever else disappeared with the missing notebooks, which versions of Dallas were deleted in this final editorial act? It is reasonable to want Morrow’s educated guesses, since she is the best-placed person to do so. At potentially divisive moments, Morrow is just as discreet as Dallas was about her literary friendships.
The second damp squib concerns Robin Dudding’s 1966 accession to the helm of Landfall, with no thought given to Dallas’s position. Even if we accept that no further notebooks were destroyed, and thus the lack of written records, it is inconceivable that Dallas did not feel anything about this upheaval.
Overall, Morrow remains modest, albeit firm, in her assessments, in keeping with Dallas’s own temperament and style (no braggadocio, no hyperbole). She offers a sympathetic, non-presentist reading of her subject: “someone who loved Southland and was proud of her ancestors’ pioneering role”. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Dallas was untroubled by a sense of deracination. She adored and personally identified with Aotearoa’s landscape, with no apparent anxiety about her settler colonial roots reflected in her six decades of writing.
Given Morrow’s careful and compelling analysis of Dallas’s life and art, it would be difficult not to crave the entire back catalogue of her poetry. Happily, instant gratification is guaranteed by the simultaneous publication of This Moment, Every Moment: Ruth Dallas collected poems, a gorgeous, definitive collection edited by Nicola Cummins.
Cummins’s anthology offers the incredible sweep of Dallas’s range, the constants and variations in a lifetime devoted to poetry. This Moment, Every Moment is chronologically organised, volume by volume, with just the right amount of contextual information. We progress from ponderous interwar juvenilia through to Dallas’s final collection, The Joy of a Ming Vase (2006). All Dallas poems are songs, whether flying under that label or not. Such profound listening to nature is a lyrical gift and it is easy to see why her poems sing to so many. Her most moving love poems have nothing to do with eros; they are eulogies to loved ones, homages to nature (“Grandmother and Child”; “Deep in the Hills”).
Nature’s majestic indifference to human concerns is the great unrequited love. Jaunty jingles sour into laments, casting their rheumy eye over the living and prophesying the death of passion. She pays careful attention to other people’s attention, well-spent or frittered away. She delights in the “amber wine” and solid gold of the sun, mixing metaphors to convey its miracle alchemy. She uses simile and onomatopoeia to brilliant, almost peerless effect. Indeed, her imagery astounds with its undeniable rightness. She resumes a suspended thought several stanzas on, like a conversation with an old friend. She is a time capsule in several thousand stanzas, recording old rituals, vernacular, birdsong and artefacts (school slates, steamship streamers, “meat-tickets”). She brings her best gallows humour to battle. Dallas’s late work was no less earnest, no less concerned with Big Themes (love, nature, death) than her first poems, but had acquired a taste for ekphrasis, Buddhist concepts and formal experimentation—including writing from non-human perspectives. It is superb regional poetry, albeit severed from the political concerns that now speak to nature throughout Aotearoa and elsewhere.
Most critics have remarked upon Dallas’s preoccupation with “ordinary” folk and the Southern landscape. If Brasch hadn’t already used The Land and the People, that title may well have been claimed by Dallas. Like Morrow, Cummins summarises Dallas’s work as “looking out rather than looking in”, without reflecting on absences. Rejecting caricatures of Dallas as an incorrigible “romantic” isolated from contemporary poetry, Morrow argues that her poems address community, history and place in a manner “comparable to the Māori concept of tūrangawaewae”. Dallas wrote that she “knew the fields and their history”, as well as that of the people who lived in Southland, past and present.
But this knowledge was partial, with omissions that may be jarring for today’s reader. In Dallas’s oeuvre, Pākehā settlers are celebrated: their energy and entrepreneurialism taming the land, seeding it with invasive species. What goes unsaid, in this account? Kāi Tahu histories; the expropriation of Kāi Tahu, in breach of te Tiriti, to Pākehā economic advantage; the ecological imperialism at play; cultural colonisation. One could go on. Indeed, Morrow’s biography needed to go further, analysing Dallas’s isolation from late twentieth-century culture and politics, in particular the Māori Renaissance and greater Pākehā awareness of Māori as tangata whenua. Instead, Dallas’s life and work are positioned outside te ao hurihuri (the changing world) like a separate planet. Morrow briefly mentions the 1853 Murihiku purchase, in which the Crown purchased seven million acres from Ngāi Tahu for £2,600. Other than a reference to the resulting deforestation, this exchange (a breach of Article 2 of te Tiriti) and its consequences are not analysed:
Some illustrations may be helpful. Dallas’s poem “Country Road” sets the tone early, published in 1953. The author serenades readers with paeans to southern “grass / That shines like soft gold hair and moves like water”. The wind, like its bard, “brings no sad tales” across that hallowed grass. We must leave the “legends in the rocks” unknown, lest the wind change. In another poem, “Flying Home”, from Dallas’s final collection, completes the sense of stasis. Soaring over the Canterbury Plains, she admires:
the cultivated level fields,
Shelter-trees and squares of ripening grain.
I was recalling those adventurers
Who came across the world with axe and spade
In search of land. And I was wishing
They could see the landscape now.
Of course, those “cultivated level fields” have come at a cost. (What—or who—had to be levelled?) But Dallas’s celebration leaves no space for histories of colonisation, whether large or small.
In sum, one comes away from Dallas’s poems feeling she ignored the power relations underpinning her place in the world. She trained her eye to seek the good, perhaps a reflection of her Buddhist leanings, rather than grappling with the real quandary of theodicy: how to account for the wrongdoings all around us. Other critics have thus equated Dallas’s “indifference to the social stir” with fealty to “the settler nationalism of the South Island Myth”. While this formulation is de trop, how should we account for her quietism? Perhaps Dallas dealt with power and history in her own subtle way, whether conscious or not. In a whimsical murder ballad about vanquishing gorse, Dallas ponders “the classic problem—How to dispose of the body?” But then, if one never acknowledges settler colonialism, there is no body to hide.
Beautiful images adorn both books. Kushana Bush’s Woman among potted plants (2012) is a perfect cover for Cummins’s anthology. And the synergy goes beyond the Japanese woodblock aesthetic, stonefruit, lush greenery, or Bush’s “eccentric historicism”. The cover is a fraction of the entire watercolour: a prim detail of the lower left-hand segment. Cut out from the top is a reclining woman, wearing thigh-high socks, sandals, a sunhat and a shawl covering precisely nothing. Lips pursed, her chin juts defiantly towards the sky. Her pubic hair winks between pale thighs. Her left hand caresses a man’s shoe, her right grasps the neck of a boiling flask from which something—blood?—leaks. Concealed eros. Confounding intricacy. Indifference to the affairs of men, luxuriating in the verdure around her. Of course! Even through such exceptional books as those by Morrow and Cummins, we only ever grasp at fragments of Dallas, left wondering amidst such beauty, such partial stories.
The conditions for producing similar books are not promising. Morrow’s biography was researched with the support of a history grant from Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage. The last such grants were awarded in 2025. To borrow from Dallas, in her poem “Pickers Wanted”, where she couldn’t bring herself to complete a mild expletive, “That’s history and bullsh [sic]”.
This excellent and mildly abbreviated review is taken with kind permission from the online site Landfall Tauraka Review. Ruth Dallas: A writer’s life by Diana Morrow (Otago University Press, $45) and This Moment, Every Moment: Ruth Dallas collected poems edited by Nicola Cummins (Otago University Press, $50) are available in selected bookstores. Ruth Dallas was born in 297 Dee St, Invercargill. Her mother ran a fruit and sweet shop, and her father, a Mason, opened a petrol station. Dallas was published by Monte Holcroft in the Southland Times and was first published by Charles Brasch in Landfall in its third issue, in 1947. She found Brasch dead in his bed in the winter of 1973. She writes in her autobiography Curved Horizon, “The early morning was still dark and wet when the doctor came in answer to my phone call…Outside his window grew some evergreen shrubs with broad shining leaves, and against this dark background I saw snowflakes falling.” There was another writer at Brasch’s bedside: Ted Middleton, who was blind. At 80, Dallas was given A Blind Achievers’ Award. Once asked, “Which person from the past would you most like to meet?”, she replied, “I should like to be able to listen to any great teacher from the past – Christ, the Buddha, some ancient Greeks.” She died in Dunedin hospital, after a fall in her home. She was 88.
