Pat White
Little Doomsdays by Nic Low and Phil Dadson (Massey University Press, 2023), 96pp, $45; Killer Rack by Sylvan Spring (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024), 88pp, $30; A Long Road Trip Home by John Allison (Cold Hub Press, 2023), 55pp, $26
Three widely different books are considered here, and there are merits in each. We move from universal to highly personal truths and back again within each title.
Little Doomsdays is a collaboration between writer Nic Low and artist Phil Dadson as part of the Korero series published by Massey University Press. In the words of Lloyd Jones, the series editor:
The Korero series invites a visual artist and writer to work together.
As editor I provide them with a topic. They can run with it or come
up with their own …
I am firstly the match-maker. Secondly, I come up with the topic.
But that is not set in concrete. I am more of a sounding board. I am
if and when needed, and as first reader.
In this case, the words of Nic Low join with images from Phil Dadson as they offer their take on a theme suggested by two words: Ark and arc. The ‘Ark’ of history or the ‘arc’ of history, perhaps? Interpretation allows for varied engagement, with Low and Dadson deciding on the terms. The resulting work presents an enigma of a kind, with a satisfying mix of the strange and beautiful, and with strong feelings engendered about what is of value in life, both past and present.
The text from Nic Low reads as an oral history might, teasing out incidents, taken at times from his own background, his imagination, or researched from other sources including the internet. Each item or section is considered part of a narrative whole. Sentences often introduce the information or ideas in a classic folkloric or indigenous manner, using the formulation: ‘It is said’ or ‘They—’, thus giving an air of authority to the texts. In ‘Item 35D13J: Seven blank Books, 1258 CE’:
It is said that the House of Wisdom, sometimes called the Grand
Library of Baghdad, was, by the thirteenth century, the largest
library in the world.
It is said that in the preceding centuries the Caliphs poured funds
into acquiring and translating texts from Greek, Chinese,
Sanskrit, Persian and Latin sages. They preserved and
mainlined the knowledge of those civilisations into their own.
It is said …
Read aloud these repetitions sound as if they could be spoken by elders from another time, those with many seasons notched on their staffs and with much head-nodding experience of ancient lore. Nic Low is no doubt aware of this tone in discourse from his well-known involvement with Ngāi Tahu stories and legends, which forms part of his own whakapapa. In this book he uses this time-spanning tone in referring to Gilgamesh, to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, to Aleppo, to cave drawing and to so much else, creating a fantastic history of his own design in doing so.
Mysterious artworks by Phil Dadson engage with the text without being explicit in their juxtaposition. Using a variety of media, such as stone rubbings, he asks the reader to delve for meaning within his works while absorbing the text. There is metaphorical truth lying beyond either the words or images used; the combination of the two serves to dig deeper, questioning language and at times challenging notions of culture, or what is remembered. Also, artist and writer continually probe the human need to seek some sort of immortality in mementoes when faced with change. This is a situation able to contain some surrealistic humour or a sense of the ridiculous within serious detail, as evidenced by ‘Item 23098KLKJJJVV: Memory of Mankind’:
It’s said that our data habits trend towards the impossible: in 150
years we will need to store more bytes of data than there are
atoms on earth.
The paradoxical conclusion is that everything can be a treasure in the ultimate Ark: Te Waka o Aoraki, where selecting items to be of sufficient value to be kept will ultimately belittle or diminish other items:
She gestured to the ocean, the hills north and south, the low
mountains to the west, the plants and animals, cities and towns,
roads and waste dumps, libraries and jails.
‘Āe, our tipuna’s ark. Already full and already under sail.’
The history of all Arks demonstrates the inability of societies down the ages to accurately rank or justify what will be kept and left behind. Time alone will do that job without our input. I am left thinking, after meditating on the work of Low and Dadson, that our job is to value and embrace all life. This is a beautifully produced art book about human concepts and philosophical perception, one filled with riches and surprises, both textual and visual.
Killer Rack, a collection of the poetry of Sylvan Spring, offers a leap from contemplation of a concept to a full-on engagement with self. Spring is a musician as well as a poet, and although this is their first book, it is difficult to imagine they see their work as other than performance. Words are used in ways to suit the stage and an audience, just as references are often made to screen performance or musicians and their work, such as Kim Sasabone and Vengaboys, Lucey Liu, Cameron Diaz, Beyoncé, and so on.
For Sylvan Spring poetry appears to be a vehicle for a discussion of the body as a manifestation of social politics. This body appears to have its own set of problems alongside reasons for celebration. All we have are words with which to hold a conversation regarding the subject, and sometimes they hit the mark. In lines from ‘come inside, you are among friends’, the poet writes, ‘there is a feral beauty rattling inside all of us’ or in ‘I believe’, ‘I believe in the extraordinary skill of knowing when it’s not / about you’, and again in the fine poem ‘Attending my own funeral’ the language works a treat.
At other times, without the performance aspect of the work, the poet’s personality gets buried under lines such as:
white gay culture is just taking whatever they can from each other
and when they’re drunk they’re not even covert about it
they barely look at each other when they speak
or care to wait for any response
and later in the same poem ‘10,000 screaming trans faggots’: ‘maybe it’s an unfamiliar code I’m not cis or gay enough to crack’.
The rhythm of the work is frenetic at times, as if electronic base notes are beating incessantly. It is spectacle or performance rather than conversation. Of course, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the mode of discourse. However, why preach to the converted? If I identify with the declaimed beliefs I’ll go with it; if not, the direct accusatory approach signals to non-believers it is time to switch off.
There are, however, other poems and lines that show a different self-awareness. These poems are tender or heartfelt, reaching out across the divide that separates any of us from another. ‘If you were a body of water, what would you be?’, while ‘baby manhands’ gather the words together like bouquets to reach out with, in lines such as:
Because if there’s
anything you deserve,
i think it’s a better
than decent love poem.
Thus, it’s a challenging collection, one to explore and find poems to connect with.
The Cold Hub Press publication, A Long Road Trip Home by John Allison, can be seen as this poet’s hymn to his part of the planet. John Allison, a notable Canterbury poet, was ill for a number of years, and he died in March 2024. A Long Road Trip Home engages with mortality as an immediate consideration and develops as a series of poems in love with life. The second poem in the collection, ‘How to go on,’ spells it out for us in no uncertain terms:
and of course you can’t
feel the same about your cancer.
Still you do admire
the vigour of delinquent cells.
When that sombre note is struck in the second poem, where the ‘c’ word is front and centre, you might wonder what sort of rough ride the reader is in for. But while there is a shadow inside which the book dwells, of all Allison’s work this volume is his most celebratory—the most affirming of existence and the sheer joy of life itself.
There is room in these poems to farewell old friends, and, importantly, to spend time with children, as in ‘How to sing sunlight’:
Sunlight is so hard to catch, she says
but it catches everything in the whole
wide world. She sings a song, I ask her
if she has learned it at kindergarten.
I’m making it up just now, she says
it’s what the sun is singing to the sea.
Children are the symbolic and promised continuation of human life, in poems such as the one above, but they are not alone: human life doesn’t happen in isolation from nature. The natural world is included with open arms also—in poems such as ‘Cedars of Lebanon’:
my middle-eastern
oud with its cedar top, the plangent tones
deepen my hearing, as if a man were knocking
on a door, as if light were tapping upon clay
before the rain, and that smell is shaken
pungent from the grain.
Allison’s work is an amalgam of culture and nature, music and walking, touch and listening, presented in the poetry with a wealth of metaphor and symbol expressed by those objects and lives we touch every day, in poem after poem. Allison writes in ‘karst mountain journey’:
I watch the river-boats
working across the current towards night-moorings
the fisherman homeward-bound with his cormorants
in the street the rows of stalls fluttering with
silks / with kites and flags / with shawls and dresses
dusk is burdened by the gathering monsoon
redolent of fruit and fish and flesh and tobacco smoke
And these lines exemplify the best of Allison’s work. This is someone facing his own mortality, happy just to be able to reflect on and polish his memories in carefully crafted poems. He is a poet unflinching at what happens next, and very thankful to have the present moment in which to live. A Long Road Trip Home affirms a wonderful gift: the ability to appreciate simplicity and acknowledge through poetic craft, that, day by day, the world offers so much for the senses to enjoy.
PAT WHITE is a writer and painter living in Rangiora. His latest publication is Night Shifts (Cold Hub Press, 2023). Currently he is working on a series of essays with the working title, ‘Some things I could have told you’, amongst other projects. He has been reviewing books for Landfall and other publications since 1974.
Leave a Reply