Piet Nieuwland
Detritus of Empire: feather/grass/rock by Robin Peace (The Cuba Press, 2024), 98pp, $25; Stones & Kisses by Peter Rawnsley (The Cuba Press, 2024), 80pp, $25; Some Bird by Gail Ingram (Sudden Valley Press, 2023), 108pp, $25; 100 Years of Darkness by Bill Direen (Grapefruit/South Indies, 2023), 101pp, $80
Robin Peace’s second book of poetry, Detritus of Empire: feather/grass/rock, reflects her background in geography and planning. This book will resonate with anyone who has a sense of the processes of the natural world, of the fragility of ecosystems, and of the way that human activity has transformed these islands. I can hear Geoff Park cheering—or would he be lamenting that so much more has been lost?
The central trope of this collection is the way in which ubiquitous grasses of many kinds have invaded these islands of Aotearoa, shining in their multitudes. They represent the progress of the colonial Empire, slowly and inexorably transforming and replacing whole ecosystems or parts of ecosystems for profit. Everywhere you look, there are grasses, exotic species, plant and animal pests, but there is a lot more to these poems than diatribe and lament. The book takes in connections with the poet’s ancestry in Norway, childhood experiences, birds of many kinds, parents, domestic situations, far-away places, and her enthusiasm for the geological strata—and its naming—that underlies all of the biosphere.
My favourites here are Peace’s experiences of swamps and wetlands, and the ways in which these places, often on the coastal margins, become repositories of all that is happening inland: in the upper parts of the catchments, where quarrying and mining, land subsidence, deforestation, major earthworks and development are eating away at the organic fabric of the land. Her recollections of childhood in these places are memorably immediate, as in ‘Swamp Witness’:
—the sucking squelch and squeeze—unwritten
caution to avoid the quick-sand shimmer of mud slurry
sinking fear above the knees …
There is a sense that everything is all mixed up in these primal zones; that identity, history, language, culture, biology and geology all come together to be reformed, remade. Peace expresses this on a personal level in ‘The lawns of paradise’:
But part of me thinks
that paradise is wild.
It belongs to the time before lawn,
so the grass will be long,
lovely and lush …
Seeping through it all is the author’s acknowledgement of her biblical reading. She also acknowledges the influence of The Albatross Book of Living Verse, edited by Louis Untermeyer, on her approach to poetry. The notes section at the end of the book is a really valuable extension to the poems, clarifying and explaining the sources of the ideas and offering titles of books for further explorations of the topics she writes about. Detritus of Empire: feather/grass/rock is an enjoyable and complete book of poetry that heartens me. And so, I, in turn, go back out into our small garden to continue re-wilding: planting harakeke and nikau, kowhai, lemon and orange, areas of vegetables and piling up mulches.
Stones & Kisses, Peter Rawnsley’s second book of poems, shows him as a playful, quirky, and sometimes funny poet who is grateful to be alive. These are poems about the passing of time. They are about nature, youth, modern life, death and tender love. The language is straightforward, direct and mostly uncomplicated, with an occasional sideways glance at, or drifting off into, the realms of quantum physics. One of the poems, titled ‘Eleven ways of looking at you sideways’, is like one of those peek-a-boo games played with children. However, this one is actually more of a love poem to his wife:
at the finishing tape, a sideways glance
confirms it was a hard race and we both won!
His poems about his younger years are light-hearted, even buoyant in mood, offering gentle reminiscences, such as in ‘First Date’, which uses the imagery of mountaineering:
Flinging their bodies to the beat
their eyes became fixed pitons,
etriers, stepping to stillness.
Years later, touching his neck,
she would say, ‘It was that moment …’
Other poems about the great outdoors render the world’s textures as something felt on the skin, as in ‘At the Cave at Castlepoint’, with its solid-rock, salty, wave-wet qualities. This poem ends contemplatively with a consideration of life-journey alternatives. ‘Forest People’, with its three columns of text, entertains with the possibilities of the many paths that could be taken through a rainforest, like the light and shadows crisscrossing through groves of bush.
‘Pinball Wizard’, a longer poem, works well as a kind of reverie, evoking slightly fantastical events and characters encountered in places and situations that bring to mind the atmosphere of English seaside piers and the hit song ‘Pinball Wizard’ from The Who’s 1970’s rock-opera Tommy. Overall, I found Stones & Kisses a very enjoyable collection that searches out the positive with unflagging optimism:
Today I am a different me than I was yesterday.
I can feel it in how I hold myself and look about.
Something has changed, everything leans a little sideways.
Some Bird by Gail Ingram is a very readable, very personal collection, and it will undoubtedly strike a chord with women who well remember when the slang terms ‘chicks’ and ‘bird’ were common parlance for young women. However, reclaiming the slightly derogatory implications of those concepts—women as fragile and flighty—the book is structured around avian life stages, which makes it simple to follow, with the central theme being the various forms and behaviours of birds. Some of this naturally concerns relationships with male birds, guys, blokes—and their strutting or courtship behaviours—so men will find numerous points of connection and understanding, too.
The early poems about adoption are compelling. They ask, how do I fit in? Why do I need to fit in? Why am I good? Why am I special? Why am I not good? The most telling is the question from other pupils at school: How can she have a brother who is seven months younger?
The confusions of puberty are well illustrated, too, as in the poem ‘Country Girls pre-mobile (I’m not just a bird)’, where the night involves getting dressed up, meeting a girlfriend, hanging out with skinny boys, drinking, vomiting and staggering out to cars with:
flapping elbows of the boys whooping
Put your foot down—a hundy! a hundy!
—and so this is a poem looking back on those seemingly unchanging rituals of adolescence that each generation experiences anew.
Later, the joys of finding a mate are explored in the section titled ‘Lovebird’. I particularly liked the poem ‘The Angel’, where the author, as a young married woman, imagines herself inhabited by an angel in a sequence leading presumably to the conception of a first child. It concludes:
as I lie, breathing heavily
next to my husband.
I find I like her lack
of guilt …
After raising children, the experiences of motherhood, and then going teaching, life changes. In ‘Invisible Woman’, the poet remembers feeling whole and beautiful dressed in a sari on a visit to India. But another younger woman in the tour group draws all the attention:
and I stood outside the circle, frozen
In a clear space
I had not known.
Then there are realisations of other necessary truths, as aspects of her own upbringing become clearer, and various acknowledgements of difficult issues such as environmental damage, racism and the nature of death. This is a worthy collection, one to be respected for its simple directness, savoured in its bitter-sweetness, and admired for its courage.
100 Years of Darkness by Bill Direen is a book of reflection, mystery and intrigue. It is a collection of poems based on his responses as a spectator to a wide variety of films, most of which I’ve never heard of or seen. For Direen, the experience of the cinema is about evoking memories, triggering dreams, and inspiring hopes for the future. The book has a great feel to it in terms of the quality of its production, compact size, and personal signature: you could take it anywhere as an elegant artefact.
The book can be read as poetry in its own right, albeit somewhat depressingly dark in its overall tone and subject matter. But references in the titles to the source films make the whole volume much more interesting as a compendium, and there’s an index at the end listing details about all the movies mentioned. A treat for both cinephiles and poetry lovers, the collection shows how a poem might inspire a film and, likewise, how a film might inspire poetry. I find myself concurring with its concept: I enjoy making a few notes about a film while watching it, perhaps a line of speech, a description of a scene, an extract of subtitle, and sometimes I end up noting the whole story, encapsulated in a sentence or two. That’s when a film seems to succeed, when it generates a response, or when it becomes the starting point of an action, as in Direen’s ‘Love and Anarchy’:
not because anarchists ‘are good for hanging’,
but because the time was past, of doing nothing …
Whether it’s the film that is compelling or the subject matter, or my familiarity with the original short story by Yukio Mishima himself, certain details provided by Direen here add another aspect to this particular blending of film and poetry—namely, those grisly moments that are not included the final edit:
We are spared much.
The insertion of the sword. The stench
of sliced intestine …
Similarly, other visceral imagery in films, sometimes unimaginably grotesque and horrible, that gives cause to advance the action can provoke an emotion-charged response recorded as poetry. Direen writes in ‘Cánh đồng hoang’, which is his poetic response to a Vietnamese movie of the same name about the Vietnam War fought against the United States:
They devise modern arts of defense—
Submerging their baby to breathe in a sealed bag
As helicopters reconnoiter …
And then there’s ‘Donbass’, where he responds to a 2018 black comedy about the Russian occupation in Eastern Ukraine, and invokes ‘the relentless onslaught of propaganda and waste, liquidated metal, body parts strewn’. Direen, emotionally caught up in the scabrous spectacle on screen and wanting to understand and communicate the feeling, writes:
It’s the language and
language’s memory, twisting the tale of meaning. It’s
betrayal, misinforming, disfiguring. It’s all the
negatives again. It’s war …
But the poetry of the book is not all so bleak; there is hope for the future, expressed as a homage to filmmakers and what they can create, as in the penultimate piece ‘Notes for a Coastline’:
Not facing west towards mountains, but west towards
The shore from above ocean, in mid-air, an orphan
Angel photographer’s sky …
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It made me want to see more films, to revisit some of those that we once viewed in those crowded film society screenings in musty halls at university, and also to seek out some new ones—and then to write, to challenge received opinions and rusted-on assumptions.
PIET NIEUWLAND is a poet, writer and artist who lives near Whangarei. He was formerly a strategic planner for conservation in Northland and the upper North Island for Te Papa Atawhai/DOC. His poems and flash fiction have been published in numerous print and online journals in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United States of America and India. He is managing editor of Fast Fibres Poetry magazine.
Leave a Reply