A Translation to Your Heart

Erik Kennedy

undressing in slow motion by Michael Giacon (GTMpress, 2024), 100pp, $30; Peel by Georgie Silk (Birdboy Press, 2024), 72pp, $30; the prism and the rose and the late poems by Schaeffer Lemalu (Compound Press, 2024), 80pp, $30

It’s often said that it takes your entire life to write your first book. This means that when a debut writer is older, as Michael Giacon is, there is a great deal of material to draw from. undressing in slow motion covers a lot of ground, from an uncommon Italian New Zealand immigrant family history, to being queer in the 1970s in a country that still criminalised homosexual acts, to late experiences of grief and resilience. The subject matter feels new, full of potential and attractive to a contemporary poetry readership increasingly receptive to explorations of identity. But Giacon works in a slightly resistant mode, and some readers may feel kept at arm’s length by quirky syntax, prolix description and jumpy rhythms.

The poem ‘Skin regime’ is mostly successful and is also a good example of how Giacon’s poems operate. He acknowledges the pressures of ageing in a lookist social milieu and at the same time lampoons them. ‘I slap my face in a halo of light / a medicinal benediction’, he begins. The benediction comes via ‘a firming film / from the manly range’. Funny stuff, and smartly said. It ends like this:

My private skin is privy to little new.
Here we are in the dark lying in a life
inhabiting within outsider skin. I massage
familiar touchy spots inflamed with genetic
rage. Sometimes I go submersible, pop
a pill to lull my exertions to sleep.
When I recall the touch of touch my skin
creeps to the memory of a shiver of wonder
and wondering for a balm like the salve
now on my lips, dry patches once kissed
wet. I flake all over my fate.

This is only the last third of the poem. The other two thirds are similarly semi-grandiloquent. The poem elaborates—often cleverly and dextrously—but then it hyper-elaborates. It draws fine distinctions about small aspects of a small event. It close-reads life in a way that can feel fussy, mannered, exerting effort beyond what the stakes of the poem call for. It speaks in a way that takes some getting used to.

Once you have got used to Giacon’s ways, there are a number of interesting stretches in undressing in slow motion, a book that is well structured. The poems featuring an amorous alter ego named Argento have a puckish charm:

We kiss by the fire, me shouting
a translation to your heart
red marble shining, snow outside
embers ash-white on a darkened world.
(‘Argento and Raffaele’)

The concluding poems, set on what appears to be a lovely bit of New Zealand coastline, strip away much of the bric-a-brac that adorned the earlier pieces. They do what sea poetry does so well: they bring together pipsqueak humans and the unimaginably huge cosmos, the finite and the eternal. It’s impossible to miss the undercurrent of mortality in the poem ‘Nature fx’:

I rock to waves that roll
right back, mist-anointed
in speechless walk over
crested sea to where I’d
be, the edge at risk; water
sighs/nature highs, theatrics
of night, how the horizon
tells me what to say.

And if fear should present
and I must decide I have
my guide above me, fire
down below. Even in a small
town you can sneak around
risking a rock, the patron saint
of give and take furtive
in afterglow white, shining
a pathway to night.

The pieces that describe his Italian family’s immigration to, and fitful assimilation into, Aotearoa are of documentary and sociological interest. They also feature what Giacon’s publisher calls his ‘signature greyscale—where possible alternatives and different meanings offer us several dialogues at the same time’. This sounds good, although in practice, as in ‘La Regina d’Italia’—

1928 or ’27 or ’23 the S.S. Regina d’Italia leaves Genova
on her last voyage and sails into the Port of Auckland.

—I wonder if this technique genuinely creates new meanings or just worries for whoever did the layout.

And I must mention three funeral poems—‘Maria, Ave’, ‘Partita’ and ‘The Modern Shout’—which show off Giacon’s talents for close observation to best effect. They all capture the unmistakable numbness and strangeness of funeral days, and also the reckonings they instigate. In one case, there is a literal reckoning of the casualties of the AIDS crisis—‘those who made it’ versus ‘the choice few / I was closest to lost in the empty zone’ (‘Partita’). In all three cases, we’re satisfied that Giacon is devoting his energy and intelligence to a subject that matters, that we need to know what he is telling us.

Georgie Silk’s debut, Peel, takes it for granted that poetry should be accessible, that the poet should speak to the reader as a confidant. It is a book dedicated ‘to the romantics who keep showing up despite the failed attempts. You are loved more than you could ever know’, and it has to be read in that light. Every poem here brings a radical immediacy. Most are intended for performance, and many would succeed. The term ‘confessional’ is disfavoured these days, because it is vague and timebound, but it could be applied here. The erotic charge in these poems won’t knock anyone unconscious (‘His hands are so porous I’m worried / they will tear me open, like skin on coral’, ‘You cut oranges, / I sucked them / into your mouth’ etc.), but Silk’s speaker does make a point of saying that one particular partner ‘can’t fuel my sex addiction or my basic need for physical intimacy’, and it feels pointedly honest for her to say that.

Peel consists of poems about love, friendship and flowering into adulthood. These poems nail their colours to the mast. ‘Return of a lover’ is characteristically straightforward:

Being with you is like standing in the Sistine Chapel
and looking at the work of Michelangelo.
It’s like the fresh pine smell of putting up the Christmas tree.
It’s like walking through vines after a wine tasting.
It’s like getting into a crisp pool in a firm navy bathing suit
with white trim that shows the right amount of butt.

Being with you is like being upgraded to Business Class.
The penthouse. A view. So lush.

It’s like being served a palette [sic] cleanser before dessert.
It’s liked salt-bathed lamb that’s so tender it falls apart
the moment you touch it with a fork.
It’s like a melting moment with a passion fruit iced centre.
It’s like watching other people take photos under
cherry blossoms in the park.

The formula is: Being with you is like [insert good thing here]. The ‘good thing’ in each case is relatable, uncontroversial, middle-class. The sprawling, conversational lines are natural but ordinary. The soundwork of ‘butt’ / ‘lush’ and ‘fork’ / ‘park’ knits it together. Then there is a hiccup in the relationship and everything pivots to its opposite: ‘And I suddenly feel like that new flavour of chips you buy / at the supermarket that one time that you think / are gonna be great but are actually gross.’ These declarations may be calculated to move the addressee, but I think readers will feel impassive. We aren’t surprised on the level of language or idea. Our expectations are not challenged or subverted. We know how to feel at the beginning, and we still know how to feel at the end. We get where we need to go, via the express route. Many of the poems in Peel (and there are only 29) function in this way. Their sincerity is an asset and at the same time a limitation.

Other poems make better use of tension and embrace strangeness, and they benefit from a more daring approach. ‘New start’ dwells in uncertainty: ‘I’m unsure how to appreciate this serenity. / I’m not missing. / Not lacking. / Not.’ ‘Lilies’ employs a wonderful metaphor about the self being the water that must keep alive cut flowers (a lover):

Am I water? Keeping you mine for a short time
but not forever.
How do we gain time?
As soon as I’d picked you, you were already dead.
We are at our best in the ground.
After that, we keep fighting to stay alive.

And ‘Croissant’ is Silk’s most ambitious and outlandish effort. She receives a kooky goodnight message from her ‘new crush’: ‘Bonsoir, you delightful French croissant’. What follows is an agonised debate about whether this is a compliment or cringe (‘To describe me as delightful, delicious, delectable, and delicate / just highlights the fragility of my femininity’), and she considers retaliating by messaging him that he’s ‘a hearty meat pie or / tasty sausage roll’. In the end, she tells us, ‘I go to sleep thinking of vulvas, and fruit flans, / penises, and tasty sausage rolls.’ It’s madcap and risky writing, and it might only half work, but you love to see the graft.

The final debut under consideration here is a posthumous one: Schaeffer Lemalu’s the prism and the rose and the late poems. Lemalu issued two chapbooks in tiny print runs before he died in 2021, and he published very little via traditional outlets, so this will be an introduction to him for most readers.

This collection is actually two projects in one. There are the late poems—eight lyrics that postdate his second chapbook. And there is the prism and the rose—a ‘digital manifesto’ that stretches chaotically across 50 pages. the prism and the rose is almost entirely quotations, mostly from films. Publisher Chris Holdaway, in a fine piece of understatement, calls this book ‘a tough initiation into Schaeffer’s work, even for those familiar with his thinking, let alone for the poetry scene of Aotearoa, which has never really embraced works of such hard-nosed appropriation’.

First, the late poems. They are sensitive, associative poems of the ‘I did this, I did that’ variety. American poet Donald Revell, in his introduction to the book, compares Lemalu to Frank O’Hara. This would ring truer if O’Hara had mostly written about getting stoned and listening to film soundtracks (Batman Begins, The Last Samurai, The Matrix, American Beauty), but I take his general point: that Lemalu is a synthesiser of high and low urban experiences, that he may waste time but never thought, and that he understands his life as art in potentia. Lemalu writes persuasively of small beauties (‘a painter once pointed to a hue in the sky / and told me theyd never seen it in a painting’) and big feelings, as in the poem ‘it crimps the nerve’, about his mother:

i wasnt always the best son to her
im responsible
it wasnt entirely my fault
he was terrifying
ive never feared another man because of him
still
i think im past that

love
love is the only thing that can save me
now

This poem is signed ‘by anon’, and the next one —the last of the late poems—is signed ‘by sean.smith’. It is hard to know what to make of these moves on Lemalu’s part; they feel like ‘his’ poems and not productions by Pessoa-esque heteronyms. But who knows what they are?

This brings us to the prism and the rose, which is attributed to ‘nolans bateman’. The reason for using this pen name is clearer, because Christopher Nolan’s three Batman films—Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises—are important source texts for Lemalu. What’s more, this is probably meant to conjure up Norman Bates from Psycho (a film also mentioned repeatedly), and possibly Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, although I can’t say I clocked an exact quote from this film. the prism and the rose stitches movie lines together into a polyphonic monologue. The mood of the piece is by turns ecstatic, melancholy randy and often rude or threatening. It is never predictable. Films sampled include The Sound of Music, A Clockwork Orange, Taxi Driver, Titanic, Full Metal Jacket, Brief Encounter, Brazil, Possessed, The Birds, The Exorcist, Fight Club, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Eyes Wide Shut, Alien Resurrection, Dogville, The Wizard of Oz, Frankenstein (the Boris Karloff one), Star Wars and Pluto’s Judgement Day, a Disney short from 1935. None of the quotes are attributed. You have to figure things out on your own. Slavoj Žižek’s 2006 documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, which discusses many of these films, lurks in the background as a possible interpretive key.

For what is essentially a bunch of smashed-up china in a pile, the prism and the rose looks remarkably good. It reads very easily, and even enjoyably. As you can imagine, it’s not simple to quote this kind of writing, even for review purposes. Just say a bunch of film lines in your head and you’ll be halfway there. Other, non-film sources are sampled, too. A book about the Canadian painter Agnes Martin, for example. I had to laugh when I got to ‘REM’, which is almost certainly a copyright violation—it’s just the lyrics to the song ‘Losing My Religion’ with a fun Easter egg of Aram Saroyan’s poem ‘lighght’ smuggled into the famous Michael Stipe line: ‘That’s me in the spotlighght / Losing my religion’.

A number of the appropriated texts at the end of the prism and the rose are described as being ‘after’ other artists: canonical poets like Eliot, Rimbaud, Rilke and Celan, or Aotearoa visual artists like Patrick Lundberg and Richard Bryant. It is enjoyable to try to divine why some scraps of dialogue from The Dark Knight might be considered Eliotic. The engaged reader will have countless questions. (I mean, in what way is the prism and the rose even a ‘digital manifesto’? The sources are all analogue.) Lemalu’s work—especially the pieces in his own words—give me a sense of a poet who was always searching. So it seems fitting to be left with questions. As Lemalu writes, in language that I believe is his own, ‘that is the art / a key for you / to unlock yourself’.

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ERIK KENNEDY is the author of three books of poems, all with Te Herenga Waka University Press: There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022) and the forthcoming Sick Power Trip (2025). He lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.