Siobhan Harvey
Prayers for the Living & the Dead by Lindsay Rabbitt (Voice Press, 2021), 64pp, $25; Still Life: Timeless poems by Helen Jacobs (TuiTwo Publishers, 2022), 76pp, $24; Stream Light by William Direen with colour illustrations by Scott Flanagan (South Indies Text and Music Publishing, 2023), 72pp, $22
‘Death,’ observed American author and journalist Norman Cousins, ‘isn’t the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.’ It’s a sentiment navigated expertly by three senior New Zealand poets as they contemplate their existence and the imminency of its extinguishment in their latest books. In this, it isn’t the universal relevancy of facing up to the world without us that lingers long after the last pages of these collections are closed, it’s the skilled authors’ ability to discover the joy and import of existence in the smallest moment and everyday engagement.
Lindsay Rabbitt doesn’t publish books frequently. But when he does, they come with literary skill and thematic punch. His previous offering, the creative nonfiction essay, These Lives I Have Buried (Four Winds Press, 2004), is a monumental work of grief I use as an exemplar when teaching undergraduates. As there, so too here: the work and its constituent elements are pared back without ever being conceptually or practically slight. Foreshadowing what’s to come, the opening poem, ‘Parade’, illustrates this:
Let us remember our dead
on this morn singing with life.
Let us bring out our lovely dead—
where there’s beauty, sorrow will follow.
What does follow is a poignant, poetic exploration of loss in all its complexities. In the deeply mulled ‘The Beats’ it is discovered in the layering of the lives of poets over those of musicians, of location in a small Kapiti town over placement in The Big Apple, and, imploding the linearity of time, of a moment in 2006 over a moment forty-two years before. So where ‘The Beats’ speaks of loss, it also speaks of its contrary: connection. And this is the take-home from so many poems about demise in this collection. ‘Raumati Sundown’, for instance, discusses finding the perfect residence to die in:
The coast follows
A cartographer’s curve
A colony of swimmers
Stands waist-deep
And the sun melts
Into history
That’s the point
You see
A place to hang
Your ancestral hat
After all we have
To belong somewhere
Elsewhere, be it through the smiling ghost of his son in ‘Day of the Dead’, memories of the hands of his jovial, hardworking father in ‘Dad’, the T.S. Eliot influenced deification of ‘the saddest month’ in ‘May’ or the restrained pleasantries of elderly neighbours in ‘Hello’, each poem finds a well to speak of the reality and intensity of letting go—that is to say, letting be. After putting this book down, I found myself deeply moved by it. I trust that, before his last word is written, we will hear a lot from Rabbitt on death and many other things.
Another author with much wisdom to impart on living and dying is nonagenarian Ōtautahi Christchurch author Helen Jacobs. In her tenth book, Still Life: Timeless poems, the self-described ‘New Zealand’s oldest poet still writing and publishing’ draws upon her decades of life experience and poetic skill to craft poems that celebrate or commemorate everything from writing to the turning of the seasons, the Ukrainian invasion, and the benefits of strolling. Whatever the subject, the poems in this collection are threaded through with mindfulness and memory. ‘Sun Poem’, for instance, navigates past and present accordingly:
This is the day for a sun poem
for light of memory of
a fishing day as the sun rises
or sets; of the hills, calling
for climbing. On the river flats
sand building. The road hot tarmac
and grass give bare armed smells
of my country corner of sun memory
My walker and I, hat crowned,
step carefully, warm to remembering.
How the extant intersects with the ancient is also evident in poems like ‘Morning Balcony’, ‘Apartment’ and ‘Place’. As elsewhere, while honouring how what is overlaps what was, the latter poem doesn’t resile from confronting the inevitability of death:
So many corners of the world
and we each take one, arrange it
to our liking;
send out our word descriptions
jostling for word space
Can you see me?
Can you hear me?
Briefly we dance with our shadow,
circling back to silence.
I think it says something about a life well lived, like Jacobs’, that while examining the significance of existence and demise, this writer isn’t afraid to ask questions occasionally without feeling the necessity to provide answers. After all, if life offers us understandings, the biggest unfathomable issue remains death, or as Jacobs astutely and metaphorically offers in the final poem, ‘Thistledown’:
In the wakefulness of the night
thistledown
touching on memories,
a seed carried to a moment.
It floats, it passes,
drops to the heavier mind
of sleep.
Recently, Jacobs’ 2020 book A Habit of Writing was translated into Italian. It, too, is a book about wisdom—the art of surviving everything from a pandemic to lost youth. Given the sagacity evident in Still Life: Timeless poems, I’ll be adding that previous work and others by this author to my reading list.
Last but not least is the prolific author and performer Bill Direen’s new collection, Stream Light. Accompanied by redolent artworks by Scott Flanagan, the author’s text explores the itinerancy of his past through the perspective of an accumulative grief, death always a shadow at the back.
For a book containing only twenty-eight poems, this collection feels far weightier. The opening offerings, ‘Yellow Morning’ and ‘Skirting’, establish the tone, topic and heft of the work to come. In the former, an exploration of the beauty found in the metaphysical—birds, the weather, the light—becomes a meditation upon the conflicting triviality of day-to-day subsistence. While the latter poem is epic, in both its prose-poem form and in its examination of a lost Dunedin, one consigned to uncertain memory:
Skirting, no one bothers you, there is some security in path
and street; the city is all yours. There is no getting lost,
every direction is home, and you are guided by a decisive
horoscope of cyclical, returning, displacement.
This sense of the ever-roving, ever-inquisitive author-narrator advances in following poems such as ‘The Hocken’, ‘Human Help’, ‘Before the Syrinx’ and ‘Burke’. Throughout, the author is our guide to geographies, which are as frail and faded as the recollections reconstructing them. Our memories, we are reminded, are our deceptive truths. As with Helen Jacobs and Lindsay Rabbitt, this is a realisation reached and poetically proposed by someone of senior years: a form of wisdom. And as with the recent collections of both those authors, what results is a thematic transition through to poems that remind the reader that the real immensity under discussion is death. In Stream Light, this is seen in a later poem like ‘The Frogs’:
You know how it is at our age: a tour ends, and, later, you
hear it is no longer possible to reassemble. Death or illness
intervene and there is no point kicking the machine.
It’s a round trip, like thinking about thought. There is a
clarity at the end of a tour, like light when you leave a shaft.
Each of us is somewhere we have not been before.
As is evident here, Direen’s distinctiveness in this collection is his painterly ability to set a scene that, once established in prose, reveals itself to be something deep and meaningful. Therein, in synchronicity with Flanagan’s images, the author composes Stream Light as a series of studies in existentialism, in what it means to live life in the moment while accepting that its expiration is always imminent.
SIOBHAN HARVEY is an émigré author of unknown whakapapa. Her most recent book, Ghosts, was long-listed for the 2022 Ockham Book Awards.
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