Tim Upperton
At the Point of Seeing by Megan Kitching (Otago University Press, 2023), 71pp, $25; In the Temple by Catherine Bagnall and L. Jane Sayle (Massey University Press, 2023), 77pp, $35; A Game of Swans by Janet Wainscott (Sudden Valley Press, 2023), 90pp, $25.
The word ‘observation’ occurs a lot in talk about lyric poetry. It sometimes seems that all poetry can do is watch, observe; as Auden says, it makes nothing happen. ‘Why’, asks poet Donald Revell, ‘represent what is already present?’
That’s more of a challenge or a provocation than a question, I think. Poets and other artists represent what they observe for various reasons—a common one being that we’re not, most of us, very good at observing. Wordsworth lamented that maturity meant an impoverishment of vision—that we lose, as we grow older, our vivid sense ‘of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower’. The seeing in a poem can remind us of that, it can create a world more real than the one we perceive through our own eyes. When William Carlos Williams constructs his red wheelbarrow, line by line, for his reader, he implies not only that everyday things such as wheelbarrows are worthy of observation but that observation itself is a crucial act—‘so much depends’ on it. Looking, really looking and seeing what is there is a creative activity—a kind of work that is hard, rare and necessary.
The philosopher Elaine Scarry says that when we are in the presence of a beautiful object—and Williams makes us see that a wheelbarrow can be a beautiful object—‘it seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication’. She points to Wittgenstein, who said that this is how we define beauty: what beautiful objects have in common is that ‘my hand feels tempted to draw them’.
This is the aesthetic of Megan Kitching’s At the Point of Seeing. In an authorial statement, Kitching stakes out her lyric territory: ‘I try for a tentative, attentive response to the environment and to make poems that might share that sense of immediacy and wonder with others.’ ‘Tentative and attentive’—this is a poetry that gets up close to its subject and attempts to replicate it but doesn’t claim to know it or understand it. There’s a suggestion in her statement of Keats’s prized quality of ‘negative capability’—an embracing of doubt, a dwelling in it.
It all begins with ‘I’, that slippery implicit or explicit character at the heart of the lyric poem. Take, for example, the first poem in Kitching’s collection, ‘Blue-tide’, in which ‘I step over the eggshell night / unwoken.’ It’s not hard to make sense of the image—the night and the speaker’s sleep are fragile, and ‘unwoken’ also summons its homophone, ‘unbroken’. The image is compressed and evocative. But then the poem, an aubade, expands beyond the speaker to what is revealed as the darkness dissolves: ‘Out of indigo pools / trees and houses / yawn, unlace their black coats.’ I hear an echo of Philip Larkin in the diction here, but in Larkin the focus of the poem would be the speaker, and the image an objective correlative for whatever the speaker is feeling. In Kitching’s image, the speaker is witness to what is literally an everyday event—the coming of dawn—and sees it anew, distinct from herself. The personification of the trees and houses shouldn’t work, but it does, paradoxically, in a defamiliarising way.
It’s that looking outward, or ‘seeing,’ that is such a strength in Kitching’s poems. The world her speaker observes is enough, more than enough, of a subject for poetry. The ‘I’ is an observing but almost negligible presence, not a focus; a point from which a poem might begin an exploration, not end one. These are not confessional poems; Kitching finds the external world much more interesting than the self’s interiority. Which isn’t to say that we get no sense of the speaker: we do, in the vivid, impressionistic flashes, the strong nouns and verbs. The landscape in these poems is seldom a backdrop—it is more often animated, violent, kinetic, stealing the show, and this speaker sees that and makes us see it too, as in this breathtaking description of wind in ‘Prevailing’:
Hills heel, the downbeat sea
stalling on its waves.
Eucalypts belly and flash,
torrents of pewter.
Only harriers hook on,
hang for the veer.
Kitching makes those repeated aitches do the wind’s work (and how refreshing it is to read such unabashedly alliterative lines! The poem begins, ‘What can wear this wind / that weights the air?’), and the ‘downbeat’ sea is also beaten down. That sense of ‘immediacy and wonder’ that she seeks is palpable here.
With In the Temple we might begin with ‘we’ rather than ‘I’, as this small, beautifully produced book is a collaboration between artist Catherine Bagnall and poet L. Jane Sayle. Visual art, like poetry, is something made, and Bagnall’s paintings—in ink and watercolour—are performances that draw our attention to their technique as well as their subject matter. Though these paintings only occasionally bear an obvious relation to the poems they appear alongside, they are wonderfully apposite in their tone and colour palette. Scratchy, comic, moody, affecting and childlike, they remind me a little of Quentin Blake’s collaborations with Roald Dahl, and a little also of E.H. Shepard’s with A.A. Milne. Sayle’s poems are brief, haiku-like in their distillations of a moment, sometimes unmoored in time, as in the strikingly beautiful ‘The Strait’:
What to make of the confusing clouds
over the long-ago bay
this morning?
The misty mountains
are not that far behind them
But what of all the years
and the cold unpredictable sea between
This poem’s description is plaintive, infused with wonder, the adjectives (‘confusing’, ‘misty’, ‘unpredictable’) conveying the speaker’s bafflement. Distances contract and expand, the way time does in memory. The temporal shifts (‘long-ago’, ‘this morning’) aren’t really shifts at all but collapses: ‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past,’ as T.S. Eliot has it. The compression (and expansion) is remarkable, and the poem’s insight is integral to its observation, not separable from it.
Rabbits, birds, insects and trees populate this collection, and the human, when it is present, is another creature in the natural environment. Enigmatic and wise, more post-apocalyptic than Arcadian, this book, like Kitching’s, raises questions rather than provides answers. In a secular world it makes room for the ineffable and numinous. ‘In the Temple’, the book’s title poem, could be describing a real temple but the accompanying picture is of birds in a forest setting—suggesting, perhaps, that the forest is a kind of temple too, a space charged with spiritual significance, like Shakespeare’s bare ruined choirs.
In Janet Wainscott’s A Game of Swans the speaker is more noticeably present or grounded, physically located in the poems, which tend towards conclusions, revelations, or epiphanies. Some of the poems engage with other works of art—paintings by Leonardo da Vinci and Julius van Leypold, a 15th-century astronomical clock, the Swan Maiden folktale, or an essay by Montaigne. In the spirit of Montaigne, Wainscott’s poems are often in the form of enquiries that the speaker attempts (and sometimes fails) to resolve in the final lines: ‘The ideal / not quite the real / in Olomouc’ (‘Olomouc’); ‘No place / for hawks and eagles’ (‘Raptors’); ‘No fire and ashes today’ (‘At Velké Losiny’).
The book is divided into three sections, the first and third of which range geographically and in their subject matter. In the first section the poems are mostly situated in a remembered past that includes European travel, art and culture. That art is long and life is short provides a kind of solace, especially in the third section of the book, which ultimately deals with our mortality and decline in old age: the bleak realities of the rest home, the fear of dementia.
The tone of the poems is wry rather than grim, and they are enlivened by a kind of imaginative and intellectual curiosity. The Swan Maiden poems that comprise the centrepiece of the book speak to a subtly feminist theme that unites what is a various collection. In one of the stand-out poems from this section, the Swan Maiden’s bewildered husband retreats into his work, denied the happily-ever-after ending he anticipated. ‘Marriage was everything he / could possibly / have wanted,’ and yet ‘He doesn’t understand how / he ended up in this / particular fairy tale.’ Wainscott’s implication is inescapable: none of us does.
TIM UPPERTON’s latest poetry collection is A Riderless Horse (Auckland University Press, 2022). He lives in Palmerston North with his cat, dog and two chickens.
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