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New Zealand books in review

A Tricky Tongue

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Vaughan Rapatahana
Small Holes in the Silence: Collected Works, by Hone Tuwhare (Godwit/Random House 2011) 343 pp. $44.99

Tihei mauriora!

Whakarongo whakarongo whakarongo ki te manu kaka hianga.

Kaore e mate koe e hoa!

Ko tau tinana nui tonu kei konei.
Ko tau wairua tino nui tonu kei konei.
Ko tau kupu tino mohio tonu kei konei hoki.

Katakata koe te taima katoa te manu kaka koe.

Katakata katakata katakata.

Hey – it’s so great to see and hold and read this book, eh. Good photos, well presented packaging and of course the poems eh. Fine selection of your moteatea here, man.
Goodness gracious me.
     Hone Tuwhare, you old tuna, you live on and on and just keep getting more lively. Man, there’s a spread of your stuff from waaaaay back before that continual reprint No Ordinary Sun, right through to a few ruri ‘previously uncollected’.
     Impressive indeed. Because there’s also lotsa translations into te reo Maori of your poems (na nga tane no tau iwi) — just as you wished, eh. I know you that could write in te reo — and there’s a coupla poems in this collection/anthology/tribute that show this – like ‘Ode to the South Wind’, your waiata for Haki and Hohepa, and your pao for Huaonia – but you grew up in the Ngata days eh, when te reo ‘had’ to take a back seat to the coloniser’s stifling big wet blanket o te reo Ingarahi. Which smothered everything in a coverall, white blizzard, including your own tricky tongue, eh. Man, you even said as much when you spoke of literary ancestors:

… while I have problems still in finding
mine, lost somewhere
in the confusing swirl, now thick, now thin,
Victoriana-Missionary fog hiding legalized land-rape
and gentleman thugs …
 (‘Ron Mason’)

and you got real kaka ears and eyes too eh. Magic ears you got, man. I mean you write ‘English’ in a very clever and sui generis way. Got a real talent – he koha no nga atua nei – to turn words into reflections of themselves, to make them doppelgangers all within the same few lines, to interrelate them across the page.

Like this, eh:

……………………………… eyes lefting
like the way they drilled us in the army
to salute bowlegged colonels. Well i prefer
the real kernels…
(‘a Hongi for you too, Spring’)

Paul Millar was right, Hone, when he said you got ‘a fascination with words – how they sounded, what they meant, which tongue they came from.’ Real slippery — bit like you, eh. Heteroglossia rules.
     Postmodern well before they even thought up that one. And so bloody bathetic at times too — just when you are about to get too high falutin’, you bring us all back down with a raw guffaw, some naughty bawdy. Knowingly like. I mean, just after you suck up to the south wind in that poem I already mentioned, you code-switch (good on you too – buggers up those academics, eh) with:

…Hello, shithead –
sing us a good one!

I like all these poems — even the really silly ones, though I dunno why they put them in here, actually. Like the one ‘A Know-all Nose’ … bit stupid if you were to ask me … which also makes me want to know why some of your other good ones aren’t here at all …? Like ‘Old Man Chanting in the Dark’, ‘God’s Day to you too, Tree’, ‘My Pork and Puha anthem’ … So a bit eclectic this collect —
     As I was saying before you interrupted me, man, I like all of your poems — you’ve KO’ed us with your koha eh. I mean there’s a movement away from those initial icebreaking efforts you unleashed on the unsuspecting Pakeha fleet 60 years ago, which were — all truth being told — rather formal and ‘English’, through to a more casual, self-involved and conversational interpolation in your own verse, travelling then to a much more lonely place in more recent poems, but what’s not to like and admire here?
     I also concur with Ken Ardvison that you make an ‘increasing use of specifically Maori material’ as you traveled on tau ara roa (your long pathway), but that does not contravene what Terry Sturm once also wrote about your work: that it ‘resists identification in terms of any separatist notion of ‘Maoriness’, given what you said to Mr. Millar about not trusting nga pakeha: ‘I wasn’t trusting too many Pakehas those days.’
     Bit of an Everyman poet you are, actually, smooth with the kaupapa, spread sensually with our patois. Or, as Bernard Gadd once earmarked: your ‘uniquely New Zealand voice’. Too true.
     You make us all wake up, too — you’re the bloody modern Maui I reckon, and man, you’re never afraid to put the boot in either, eh:

Warawara, Pureora, Okarito

Guvment Agencies
Have given Private Enterprise
Permission for to strip
And rip-off Kauri, totara,
Kahikatea for to supply
Timber for million-dollar
Yachts and mansions.

Bastards:
Stop your raping of the land.
Fuck off.

No one writes like you — anywhere, given that your word smatterings are far better listened to than read, as all moteatea Maori were anyway. Janet Hunt rightly and tightly grasped about you: ‘being the person [who] moved close to making ‘the connection between traditions.’ Moteatea, modernism, multilingualism mashed into a potent new brew: that’s a bloody big cross to bear, but, hey, I mean it. Ultimately your own words are your living epitaph — a true blue original wordsmith hammering away on that bloody wide anvil of lexis. You got me Hone.

Like, I’m euchered man. I’m eclipsed (‘Hotere’) 

So what I’m doing now is to go off on a bit of a tangent to really close-look at one of your pieces, ‘Small Signs & Impressions’, (I like the earlier title, ‘Tangaroa at Te Araroa, 1979’ far better by the way, mate.) Who said I can’t do this? I’m trying to really bring to bear what makes you so worthy of a statue or two more. Bloody icon, indeed.
     The piece is a(nother) korero with Tangaroa – the sea, eh. Straight away a cheeky, mouthy metaphor:

Hey, you, Tangaroa, ocean. YOU, with
the blubbery, soft-thwacking gums
working …

Real familiar personification this. On to ‘Whetumatarau’, who ‘scratches a bushy head’, continuing this interwoven ruminative rap in the same vein. (Somehow, this mighty pa has been misspelled in this poem — I should know because Hinehou Collier was my mother-in-law and she wrote the waiata about this impenetrable place. Great song.)
     So, those supposedly ‘naked hills’ of Brasch, Chapman, Curnow and company do have voices, feelings, wairua! ‘The mountains are empty,’ Charles Brasch had wailed — bullshit, I say. Hone Tuwhare was up in them, boiling a bloody billy, and listening to them. And talking right back, I bet. And man, he could talk lovely too, yunno — did you ever listen to him read his own stuff?
     Which reminds me — where was Hone in Curnow’s 1960 book? Bloody invisible! ‘… it’s hard not to raise an eyebrow at the exclusion of the emergent voice of Hone Tuwhare from [this] collection’ complained Michael Neill, justifiably. How could you ever have been invisible even back then, Hone?
     Back to this poem. A jump next into italicised biblical bathos, the ancient and the current all co-existent here, all threatened by the murderous tracts of standardisation, homogeneity, destruction. But you threaten back to them, good on you:

And who impose a common tongue on
the sister and brother voices of Babel, pray?

Then we swing swimmingly back to Tangaroa, still being addressed like one of your own rowdy cuzzies from down the line, albeit with wonderful metaphoric ease:

‘… YOU, out
there, kaumatua, chest heaving, floating on
your back…’

and we wonder if it’s in fact Tangaroa who is the bad guy. Te Waha o Rerekohu – The old, old tree, wide as the world, many-rooted,/ is leaning back, bad thoughts amputated, waiting/ for his own special pataka …’ — of course — also makes an appearance, reflecting on the rugby field of the school, and the storehouse of the same name, spread out beneath his humungous stretch, while the bard – you, eh — then invokes his own clan — Ngapuhi — who had devastatingly raided Ngati Porou and Te Araroa (then the original Kawakawa actually): something which nga tangata o Matakaoa rohe (or district) have never forgotten/forgiven.
     Your friend and constant companion – rain – also drops in toward the end, before the final patai ki Tangaroa;

‘And whose is the lasting
victory, Tangaroa?’

The ‘answer’ is a koan (and aren’t you often so Asian-orient-ed in your ruminations and your runes, Hone, I here also reflect):

‘On one side of the tree only, leaves stir to a fickle
wind, passing.’

The small sign is in Te Waha o Rerekohu’s erstwhile glissade of leaves, a nonchalant flutter of his massive pohutukawa mass in a benediction to his cohorts, the sea, the mighty bluff that is Whetumatarau, showers, and the wind. Their hui continues, but – pae kare – they’re always ready to resist any taua or war party, any crusade, any:

 ‘…threat from the South…
A threat hidden behind the headland
to the North…’  that might ‘pension me off, for crissake!’

Great poem. I’m tempted to say that you really got to be a bit au fait with the East Coast, thus Ngati Porou, as regards the scenario portrayed here, but if you can grasp the indigenous perception that Nature talks and walks and stalks, that all of her elements interrelate, that she precedes us and exceeds us and sees us and waits for our demise back into her, so as to be regenerated again and again and again, into a constant living heterogeneity, untrammeled by systems, decrees, rules on how to live, how to talk, how to write, how to be — you’re well on the way.
     Such resistant resilience following its own routine is rather like the poet and his poems in the book I’m holding here right now, actually. Can’t be incinerated, eh Hone.
     Small Holes in the Silence indeed. Kaore nga poka iti. Kaore nga kupu kore hoki. Not small holes. Not silence either, eh. If anything, it’s the dirty silence of Bill Manhire. To paraphrase Wallace Stevens, Hone – you make the silence a hell of a lot dirtier. Good on you. Muddy those waters of bourgeoisie conformity, regularity, narrow-mindedness, prejudice, inanity, pedantic cant.

Engari nau te whatu Maori. (But with the eyes of Maori.)

Kia ora e hoa. Kia kaha ki te kaka.

VAUGHAN RAPATAHANA is a New Zealand writer, poet and teacher who currently lives in Hong Kong. His iwi affiliation is to Te Atiawa. He holds a PhD from the University of Auckland.

Hazing with Cricket Balls

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Nick Ascroft

‘A Tingling Catch’: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864–2009, edited by Mark Pirie (HeadworX, 2010) 189 pp., $34.99; AUP New Poets 4: Harry Jones, Erin Scudder and Chris Tse, (AUP, 2011), 96 pp., $24.99


‘A Tingling Catch’, Mark Pirie’s anthology of New Zealand cricketing poems is unabashedly a pleasure — a pleasure which I mistakenly initially expected to be, if it were so, a guilty one. A skimming, darting and then progressively more engaged reading, however, soon convinced me otherwise, suggesting rather that its subject matter is one of the more worthy nails to fling the horseshoe of poetry at, if I may fail to employ a cricketing metaphor. However, if you don’t like, and in fact hate cricket — all that lilied gentility wrapped around thumping red-ball testosterone — perhaps better just to steer yourself clear.
     My initial comcern was that the meeting of minds of cricket-haters and poetry-lovers might make too large an intersection for a book of this sporting nature to be viable. An idiotic thought. There are, let’s face it, more lovers of cricket than (New Zealand) poetry by the hundredfold, and the populism of approaching such a market is not to be pooh-poohed. Poetry should be read by all, and it isn’t pandering to write on subjects that large numbers of people want to read; it is generous, humble and, in the sense that should you fail it will be more apparent, brave. (And on the other hand who can say what wonders of conversion may not be wrought.)
     The reason cricket befits poetry goes further than that it rhymes neatly with ‘wicket’ (though this fortuity is pounced upon by nearly all of the rhyme-based poems). Poetry requires lexical beauty, metaphor, drama, politics, all of which are in inherent abundance in the game. Its language is especially evocative, from the ‘ye olde worlde’ fustian of the field positions  — the gulley, the long leg, the metonymy of the slips  — to the more modern neologisms that stuck, or caught: the ‘googly’, the ‘titanium duck’. Not to mention the historical milieu; the cricketing nations make up a post-colonial legacy of considerable textual heft, providing not only an aspect of the imperial imprint of Britain in the Caribbean,  and the Indian subcontinent, and southern Africa and Australasia, but also a latter-day narration for assertion, fight-back and pride of independence. The Commonwealth in a way was — is — held together by the game of cricket. The game lends itself to providing the easy drama, the cliffhangers of conflict and loss and triumph, that the craft of poetry can utilise.
     True to form, Pirie is omnivorous in his selections, and while some might prefer less of the rhyming couplet doggerel (not I!) or less of the whacked-out jazz-cigarette poems (no comment!), the largeness (and largesse) is warm and fun. While I find Kendrick Smithyman’s ‘Uncle Arthur’ the most beautiful thing in here — (‘He was so small when he was born,/ the ayah used to say, you could bath him/ in a quart pot.’ And then, ‘he was somehow/ bombed out … when he passed/ … caught and bowled in the mid-century of the/ Common Man.’) — any cricket non-hater will certainly alight on some other particularly suited wonder. I recommend it to the unprejudiced as a present for all occasions, excluding perhaps only weddings.

***

A single  sturdy central theme — or thematic motif — also lifts the poetry of Chris Tse from any hint of leaden-footedness. His ‘Sing Joe’ in AUP New Poets 4, while containing some lovely single poems, is made more cohesive through its retelling of the story of Tse’s great-grandparents coming to New Zealand early in the twentieth century. That the ‘Joe’ of the title emigrates first, not to be followed by his wife for some years, and only after he has started a new family, meaning that she must arrive pretending to be an aunt, gives the tale a sense of the operatic — secrets within secrets, doors opening and closing, an ellipsis of telling that’s sometimes comic, sometimes melancholy.
     Family history and ethnic identity is something many, if not most of us, cling to in New Zealand, and the story of a Chinese family’s settlement in New Zealand gains in fascination from being the less told: less written about. While elements of the universal experience for those made other in their homeland can be found, Tse’s story remains emphatically personal, emotionally reverberant in its very clipped, tightly-wound expressiveness: ‘This talk of the other that trails/ my every move …/ speaks not of defiance, but of blood clot guilt./ … It mattered back then too,/ possibly even more so –/not knowing which crayons to use at school/ for family portraits …’. His ‘return’ to China at the end of the sequence is poignantly delivered.
     Erin Scudder, a name which flung at you might sound like a stage direction, is the second of the three poets in this assemblage of emergent talent, and she too has a gift for elliptical storytelling. Her emphasis though, is more on single poems, which characteristically possess the insouciant knack of  achieving a story’s arc in a short space of time, while remaining crisply well told, a quality many New Zealand poems lack, as if their authors associate a more shambolic shaping with a more authentic mode. Scudder reminds me of Jenny Bornholdt in her turn of phrase, which remains conversational yet is delivered with a controlled grace – though she differs, perhaps, in her waspish wit, in her odd perspectives, and in her knowing inclusions of classical references. Here’s an example of all-of-which-in-one in this excerpt from her account of the famous suicide, Lucretia: ‘See Sextus slip/ into Lucretia./ She didn’t want to let him but he told/ her he’d kill her and wreck her repute too. Do/ you see how grittingly, today,/ she wills herself away.’ As with Chris Tse, Scudder’s top-billing as the main character of her poems is justified by her interestingly ready and quick-witted persona. Her effortless-seeming nonchalant stylings are cleverly done, and they suggest that this poet has the potential to become a prominent fixture in the small room with large windows that is the New Zealand poetic scene.
     Harry Jones, being the most straight-talking of the three AUP poets here, makes you feel that he could write excellent verse on cricket, if he could ever be pushed in what seems an unlikely direction. They would be bleak and candid affairs however, involving hazing with wicket bails or the long-remembered disappointment from a father at the boundary. Jones is not as ‘new’ as the other poets, his hair a hoary streak on the back-cover photo, and this has clearly given him the confidence of experience. There is nothing in him of the need to impress or, rather, the need to be liked. He tells truths and doesn’t require to shine them up for us. When the candour seemingly emanates from Jones as opposed to a character, he does not always come across as hugely likeable, but the poems, the honesty and the intelligence of his musing are more palpable for it. Like Scudder, Jones takes on the rape of Lucretia, but he is less playful, juxtaposing the Titian painting (‘He has one bare knee already/ Between hers.’) with the real-life rape and savage murder of a Christchurch sex-worker. That he is haunted by both and by other terrors of the world is convincing, and regrounds a reader in the humanity and barbarism of their own world. Undoubtedly, New Poets 4 is another words-worthy triptych in the series from the redoubtable AUP.

NICK ASCROFT has published two collections of poetry with Victoria University Press, and at present is employed in the academic publishing industry in London. He is the current British Mind Sports Olympiad Scrabble champion.

Poetry’s Many Different Voices

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Nicholas Reid
The Best of Best New Zealand Poems, edited by Bill Manhire and Damien Wilkins (Victoria University Press, 2010) 224 pp., $35.00; These I Have Loved – My Favourite New Zealand Poems, edited by Harvey McQueen (Steele Roberts, 2010) 192 pp., $34.99.

Because you are reading this, you are part of the electronic revolution. These words exist only in cyber-space. Paper has nothing to do with them. And for the last twenty years or so, clever people have been telling us that this is the way ahead. Websites, blogs, on-line journals etc. are going to take the place of those physical objects, books. Printed books will go the way of the hand-written codex. A few reactionary ‘craft’ printers might still produce them as a kind of folk-hobby, but the rest of us will be Kindling and reading off screen rather than off page.

            So isn’t it funny that when an on-line journal reaches its tenth year of successful production, it celebrates by producing a real physical book with real physical pages?

            The Best of Best New Zealand Poems gathers together what Bill Manhire and Damien Wilkins consider to be the cream of Victoria University’s online poetry journal Best New Zealand Poems, which began in 2001. The journal has had a different editor each year, from Iain Sharp in 2001 to Chris Price in 2010, so initial selection of contents is not tied to one person’s idiosyncratic taste.

            In his introductory essay, Damien Wilkins’ tone is a little defensive about producing a book to celebrate something online. He is determined to pre-empt this obvious criticism, as well as some others. There is, as he correctly notes, an element of hubris in calling a personal selection of contents ‘the Best’. He points out that of the 65 poets represented, there are 38 women and 27 men, so the two blokes who selected the contents haven’t been sexist or anything. He also writes: ‘One final piece of accounting – and this will inflame some readers. By my estimate more than 30 per cent of the poets in this book have connections to either the International Institute of Modern Letters or Bill [Manhire]’s old Original Composition class. What can we say?… these are the poems that most excited us.’ I’m not sure that it was prudent to say this. Whatever Wilkins’ intention, it inevitably creates the impression of a clubby in-group.

            And so to the 65 poets, arranged in alphabetical order from Fleur Adcock to Ashleigh Young.

            The hell of reviewing an anthology is that one is implicitly required to pick trends or make some sententious statement about the state of modern poetry. I am completely unable to do this. Walking from poet to poet, I encountered many different voices using radically different techniques:

            I’m interested that it is women rather than men who tend to dwell on the rough stuff (Michele Amas’ raw sexual concern for her daughter; Tusiata Avia’s celebration of a wild and crazy sexual encounter; Bernadette Hall worrying about war; Anne Kennedy watching the All Blacks’ vigorous tribal battle on the telly).

            Men and women are equally satirical (Hinemoana Baker’s surrealist protest poem; Gordon Challis defying regulations; Karlo Mila angry at fake stereotypes of Pasifika; Robert Sullivan doing his block about the government’s overriding of Maori customary right).

            Men and women are equally prone to strong feelings about parents and family (Rachel Bush in praise of old-time at-home Mums; Geoff Cochrane writing tenderly about his brother; Rhian Gallagher burying her father; Andrew Johnston’s long stately elegy for his father; Vivienne Plumb reflecting on her very sick son; Sonja Yelich worrying about the kind of education her kids are getting).

            Some poems are written loose blog-style (Jenny Bornholdt seeing a poet as a fitter turner; Stephanie de Montalk facing a bone-scan).

            By contrast, a few brave spirits go for more traditional structures and metres (the eight rhyming lines of Alistair Campbell; that radical young poet Allen Curnow translating Pushkin; John Gallas breaking into rhyme; Paula Green almost writing a Petrarchan sonnet; C.K. Stead replaying Allen Curnow’s loss of  Christian faith).

            I could pick out those poets whose selection is dream-like or surrealist (Fleur Adcock), and those who are more social-realist (Peter Olds). But it is really impossible to make generalisations beyond the ones I’ve already made.

            And this one. New Zealand poetry is in good health. It produces a lot of interesting stuff.

            One quibble. At the back of the book are biographical notes on each contributor, and a statement from each poet on what the poem means or what inspired it. Some of these statements ramble on for longer than the poem being explained. The rebellious part of me kept wondering why the poems needed such crutches to lean on. Were they not capable of communicating what they had to say by their own text?

            High praise, then, to Sam Hunt and Gregory O’Brien for not playing the game and for providing no such explanation of their contributions.


 •••


Harvey McQueen died late last year, at the age of seventy-six. He was a considerate teacher and anthologist, as well as a good poet in his own right. I had the pleasure of reviewing his last collection, Goya Rules, for Poetry New Zealand. I judged it sane, civilised and capable of making big statements about history without either embarrassment or mawkishness.

            The same statement can be made of the anthology These I Have Loved, the last thing McQueen produced before his death. As the title (per Rupert Brooke) makes clear, in choosing his one hundred favourite New Zealand poems, McQueen was guided first by his heart, not by current critical fashion or consensus taste. He explains in his introduction that he was not deterred, either, by complaints that some of his choices might be considered hackneyed. So he includes Ruth Dallas’s ‘Milking at Dawn’, Denis Glover’s ‘The Magpies’, James K. Baxter’s ‘Lament for Barney Flanagan’, Allen Curnow’s ‘House and Land’ and Mary Stanley’s ‘The Wife Speaks’. And why not? They deserve to be on anybody’s list of the twenty best New Zealand poems ever, let along the hundred best. It doesn’t matter that they have been anthologised often before.

            From somebody who died at a reasonable old age, much of McQueen’s selection consists inevitably of earlier generations of poets. Mason, Baughan, Bethell, Glover, Curnow, Fairburn and Tuwhare are generously represented, and a whole section is devoted to Baxter, whom McQueen describes as: ‘bestriding my poetry life like a colossus’. But McQueen kept reading new poetry to the end, and These I Have Loved also comes up with goodly selections from newer breeds (Kate Camp, Jenny Bornholdt, Mark Pirie, Janet Charman) as well as a few surprising choices from poets who have published little.

            How do you judge somebody else’s selection of favourites? You don’t really. You sit back and take in the anthologist’s comment that: ‘to a considerable extent [the selected poems] represent who I am, or maybe the person I would hope to be.’ The anthology is organised thematically. Each section is introduced by a brief essay. Often the tone is autobiographical, as McQueen explains why and how he first encountered the selected poems.

            He knew his end was approaching as he anthologised. He writes: ‘I’ve been diagnosed as having a rare muscular degenerative disease with no known cure.’ This is a browsable and school-friendly anthology. Also a heck of an epitaph.



NICHOLAS REID is an Auckland-based historian, poet and reviewer. He blogs about books online at Reid’s Reader.

Three Ways to Divide Poems

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Cy Mathews
Lost Relatives, Siobhan Harvey (Steele Roberts 2011), 71 pp; in/let, Jo Thorpe (Steele Roberts 2011), 63 pp; So Goes the Dance, Stu Bagby (Steele Roberts 2010), 64 pp.


A good book of poems should be more that just a collection of whatever the poet has been writing over the past few years; it should have a shape, a thematic structure that holds together between its covers just as soundly as each individual poem holds together on the page (or should it? For whenever I make such a pronouncement, it occurs to me that the opposite might be true: poetry books as junk-piles, as cluttered basements and attics, any trace of shape or cohesion blow apart by the words …  for the sake of this review however, we’ll stick with my original statement …). Many current New Zealand poets attempt to give their books structure through the simple device of dividing the text up into sections. Most of the new books I’ve read this year have worked this way, their contents chopped up into bite-sized chunks – sometimes titled, sometimes numbered – for more meaningful consumption. The three works I review today are no exception. Each of them attempts to structure their content at the level of the contents page, in differing ways and with differing degrees of success.
              Siobhan Harvey’s use of sections is somewhat playful. Lost Relatives is divided up into two main sections, titled respectively ‘Lost’ and ‘Relatives’. Each section is further separated into two titled subsections: under ‘Lost’, we find ‘The Émigré Lands’ and ‘Whanau Farewelled’; under ‘Relatives’, ‘My Son and I’ and ‘My Theory of Relativity’. Themes of migration and travel, and the dislocations from family and familiarity that results from such things, run through all these sections. Various forms of flight are used as frequent – if unsurprising – metaphors, the book scattered with birds, airplanes and airports. In counterpoint to these airborne elements is the suggestion of the pull of gravity and the ultimately limited nature of movement and travel. As Harvey puts it:

           now I see that birds and people are one:
           for both, migration is a cage

          whose door is always open
          but whose captive refuses to leave 

Many of the poems are powerfully physical. Titles like ‘Tooth’, ‘Losing your umbilicus’, and ‘Clavicle’, all found in the ‘Relatives’ sections, iterate the concrete nature of bloodline and the visceral nature of separation. There is an occasional flat note – as, for example, when Harvey takes the flight trope to its most clichéd extreme and evokes Icarus as a metaphor for the aspirations and disappointments of migration – but these moments are rare, and are redeemed by such fresh and simple lines as:

           . . . You were
           a book living in a different library

As the title suggests, this is a contemplative and, at times, melancholy book. Harvey walks a fine line between meditation and fantasy, and seems well in control of her poetry. Of the three books under review, hers is the one with the most satisfying sense of overall shape: an arc of poems in flight, cohesive, yet with a touch deft enough to remain also allusive.


                                        ***

Like Harvey, Jo Thorpe goes for the titled-sections option; she divides in/let up into ‘Mother tongue’, ‘How to dance your own body’s legend’, and ‘the warrior ethos’. Dance is of great importance to the book: Thorpe herself is a dancer, dance critic, and teacher of dance history at the New Zealand School of Dance. The cover illustration of in/let is a bold blue-on-white Matisse print of a leaping dancer. This vibrant, abstract image, combined with the playful typography of Thorpe’s title, led me to expect poems more stylistically experimental on the page. This was not, however, the case: Thorpe’s poems are formally quite conventional, enacting few typographical leaps or pirouettes. For the most part, they likewise take a conventionally lyrical approach to their subject matter. Yet within these conventions there is something more challenging and experimental going on. There’s frequently an odd clunkiness to Thorpe’s diction, a tendency towards unusual word combinations that can cause the reader to give a double-take. Lines sometimes run on just one beat too long, or seem almost syntactically garbled (yet aren’t). For example:

           One makes dances for the febrile wire zinging inside us
           or

           Tell infantry men, bearers of
           searchlights: why perimeter not convivial space?

Her similes can also be odd: in the same poem that the above two lines come from (‘An ABC of allegiance’), she describes a butoh dancer as ‘intent as an ant’. While there is certainly something insect-like about butoh dance, the frenetic and industrious ant seems an inappropriate comparison. Yet butoh itself – that strange, grotesque form of dance/performance that arose out of post-atomic bomb Japan – does resonate with the slightly awkward, strained nature of Thorpe’s style. While her poems may not dance visually, at the level of line and phrase they make strange leaps and jerks, circling around their subject matter in intriguing and stimulating ways. And while the three-part structure of her text seems somewhat arbitrary, adding little to the overall structure or meaning, the book nevertheless forms a satisfying unity.


                                                ***


Despite its title, Stu Bagby’s So Goes the Dance does not lend itself to such metaphors. Bagby’s style is casual and, at times, colloquial. The poems occasionally dip into rhyme, usually in the form of whimsical couplets:

           Could we form a nexus,
           say, in Paris, Texas?

It’s interesting that rhyme seems reserved for such playful moments; when Bagby turns to more serious subjects, he shifts gears into free verse. So Goes the Dance is divided up into four parts. Parts 2 and 3 focus on specific subjects: aging and death in the former; literature and the experience of writing in the latter. Part 1 and 4 however, seem more miscellaneous, essentially assemblies of occasional verse.
In most of the poems, Bagby’s lyrical ‘I’ is firmly foregrounded; he writes about memories of childhood, recollections of people and of landscapes, and about scenes outside his window. Moment leads on to moment: in one poem, the act of picking beans in the garden reminds the poet of Les Murray, which leads into a recollection of Australian coins, which further sparks some meditations upon Queen Elizabeth. The poem ends up in a nicely offbeat place, as the poet, amongst his beans, imagines the decapitated head of the Queen tumbling through space. Another poem, ‘And how come it’s raining’, also experiments with surreal and uncanny imagery, and is quite beautiful as a result.

                                                                           ***


            To return, then, to the subject of form. Harvey’s book provides an example of a well-structured work that uses internal sections to subtle effect. In contrast, the collections by Thorpe and Bagby benefit little from their internal divisions. Their senses of shape and theme – and make no mistake, both these books do have shapes and themes – would come across just as strongly without such sectioning. In Bagby’s case, the book would be stronger without its division into parts; the focus of sections numbered 2 and 3 makes sections 1 and 4 look somewhat aimless in comparison. Removing these sections, and allowing the poems to flow on from one to another, would avoid this impression, and would allow stronger resonances to swim through each text. As readers, we don’t always need our poems packaged up into neat containers. As poets, we should remember that form and structure shouldn’t be mistaken for a well-ordered table of contents.

CY MATHEWS is a poet and a post-graduate student in the English Department at the University of Otago.

Literary Promenades

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Murray Edmond

Two Walk in Edinburgh, photographs by Mari Mahr, poems by Gregory O’Brien, afterword by Jenny Bornholdt (The Holloway Press, 2011, $225.00); A Morning Walk in the Later Days, by Leonard Lambert (Cold Hub Press, 2010, $18.00); Devonport: A Diary/Esplanade, by Bill Direen (The Holloway Press, 2011, $100).

No book is just a book: it is always framed by the occasion of its production. In the instance of the three books under consideration here, we have two books as objets d’art (Devonport and Two Walk in Edinburgh) and one chapbook (A Morning Walk). These two types of book are at the opposite ends of a continuum. The term ‘chapbook’ comes from those who once sold them: chapmen, hawkers of tracts, ballads and pamphlets. ‘Chap’ itself originates long ago in the Old English word for ‘barter’. Leonard Lambert’s A Morning Walk in the Later Days belongs to a series of poetry chapbooks from Cold Hub Press in Governor’s Bay. The other two volumes are from Holloway Press and the material stakes and aesthetic values are at the high end of the market.
Having myself created a book of writing plus photography (with Joanna Forsberg’s photos) for Holloway Press (The Fruits Of,  in 2009), I’m not sure I should be commenting on another Holloway book of photos and writing, especially one that seems to do everything opposite to ours; this Mahr/O’Brien book being clear, logical, illustrative, descriptive, black and white, very much to-the-point. You read the poems, and you read the photos – or rather you scan the pages, as Vilem Flusser terms it, as if running your hands over them, as if scanning with two hands – in the manner of a Braille reader: one hand reading the structure of the image, and the other hand reading the observer’s intentions. As the observer in this instance, I must now reveal my intentions.
When you read Gregory O’Brien’s poem and it says, ‘The hand contained but one/thought, the unopening window/another’ and the photo opposite contains a hand and a window and the next poem reads, ‘With its invisible hands and clock-like face’ and the photo opposite shows a disc like a clock face without hands and a single number (‘10’) on that face and the face is mounted on a building façade like a public clock might be, and so on, then you know you are in the realm of the symbolically illustrative: poem illustrates photo, photo illustrates poem, encoded meaning is doubly doubled. The problem with this is the redundancy. Nothing much is added by either component. The hope is that the partnership will create an intensification by repetition. Mahr’s photos, in themselves, already to some extent operate like intensification systems. They are curiously like stills from a Bergman movie from the 1950s (Winter Light or Wild Strawberries). There is not much composition of image, rather a literary placing of objects in the frame (a plaster hand, a sizing brush, an old book, a sunflower, or most Wild Strawberries-ish, a pocket watch slung round a stone pillar). All this in black and white only. These are images for decoding in a linear way: ‘What does the watch mean?’ the photo asks us. In her note at the end of the book, Jenny Bornholdt tells us what the watch means: ‘In this moment time is held.’ So we know, in that kind of way. Holloway Press produces beautiful books of a wide variety within the book-as-fine-art-object-in-itself type. This one feels exactly like that type of book should be, but not more than that.

***

Leonard Lambert’s poems focus on coming to the end and looking back. It’s that moment in life when ‘the long ago’ is ‘oddly close.’ What the hell did father do about this moment? He tried to get his bearings: ‘My father was always putting up weather vanes.’ It is not hard to hear the vanity in this. Lambert’s poems sniff out vanity, as if he himself was that ‘greying dog’ he uses as an image of ‘winter’ (and it’s not really winter, it’s his approaching old age as if he were winter, and so the images circle back and bite their tails). In the poem called ‘Community Service’ he claims life is more a ‘sentence’ than a ‘gift’. Yet you get the sneaky feeling that he’s quite enjoying being here and noticing that it is like this. These poems are subject to their own usurpation.
          It surely is the hour of the final death-knell of World War II fathers, here and in Jeffrey Paparoa Holman’s book Fly Boy (Steele Roberts, 2010). But we should make a clean breast and confess that these small laments are for ourselves. It’s all a ‘swan-song of sorts’ as Lambert notices as he writes about remembering the Vulcan bomber flying over: ‘a small boy’s heart stood still.’ Dead then, and now soon to die. Rue the day. Maybe at such a moment there’s only loss to remember, but what can poetry do about this? That question is not taken up here and it might have made the poetry more alive, while there’s still time, if it had been. Ovid noted it all in the opening of his Metamorphoses, how the Golden Age gave way to the Silver, then the Bronze, and last the Iron, but immediately he went on to tell all those stories of transformation. 

***

Bill Direen’s diary of his time of holding the Michael King Writing Fellowship at the University of Auckland and living in the Signalman’s House on Mount Victoria, Devonport, which is part of the Michael King Centre, juggles with and meditates on the problems of the diary form itself; whether the quotidian should be filled with the marvellous or the mundane. He confronts the insects in the kitchen, and relates this sense of embattlement to living next to the naval base and on a hill with gun emplacements dating back to the imagined Russian invasion of New Zealand. He stands on the edge of the lapping tide and launches into a delightful diversion about the moon, the tides and the ‘principal lunar semidiurnal’.
Finding a good diversion is counter-ballast to plodding though the days, diary-style. There is something quaintly Beckettian in Direen’s counting and numbering and obsessive trips to the tide line ‘to stand calmly by the water.’ The aimlessness of being a writer begins to shine through. My grandmother once asked me, ‘What do you want to write poetry for’ and I took the opportunity to play the smart-arse and reply, ‘That’s the point, it’s pointless.’ Direen, who, has lived in France for some time (as Beckett did) plays the scales of existential and geographical alienation: ‘I’m not of this place./Am of this place.’ The Beckett echo is from the end of Waiting for Godot: ‘Let’s go. They do not move.’ Direen looks at the landscape and see its impermanence, of which the tsunami is one possible agent: ‘everything is bach-like/it could all go in a wave.’ Vladimir in Godot looks at the landscape and describes it as ‘indescribable.’
Direen’s diary goes beyond description, whether literal or symbolic, in search of an awareness of the endeavour of writing itself, surprising himself in discovering what he is engaged at. He wonders how to know if the diary form is finished. Quoting Matisse about not repeating a line, he questions the validity of re-writing. Just as a book is never simply a book, so he notes that there are many kinds of notebooks. The notebook, basis of this printed diary, returns the reader’s focus to the moments of composition. And this notebook/diary records the moment of the September earthquake in Christchurch, where Direen’s father and brother and sister-in-law are located. The writing response to the quake consists of a series of Joycean (James Joyce being Beckett’s mentor) language flourishes: ‘Manmade … mad made.’  At the core of this intriguing meditation, in its plain and tasteful Holloway Press presentation, is an ambiguous curiosity about the very act of recording in writing – ‘Writing dares to oppose all that disguises things as they are’ (p. 25) – that might derive from the elegant paradoxes of French literary theory. At the same time, Direen’s writing contains an almost naïve directness: ‘I will probably never live in such a nice place as the signalman’s house …. ever again.’
A short fiction, ‘Esplanade,’ is appended to the diary. Once again Joycean flourishes appear, this time as the call-girl approaches the Esplanade Hotel where B (the particle) waits. For Direen, like Beckett, French and English are his writing languages. Like Beckett, when asked whether he was English (and the same would apply if he were asked if he were French) he could reply: ‘Au contraire’. He is located here, in his diary.

MURRAY EDMOND teaches drama at the University of Auckland. His most recent volume of poetry is Walls to Kick and Hills to Sing From: A Comedy with Interruptions (AUP, 2010). He edits the on-line journal Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics: http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/kmko/

Summer’s Last Cicada

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David Herkt
Campana To Montale: Versions From the Italian, by Kendrick Smithyman, edited by Jack Ross and Marco Sonzogni (Edizione Joker – Transference series, 2010) 244 pp., $35.00.

Translation is a loaded literary subject. The transmutation of a poem, from one language to another, is a fraught act, and the status of a translated poem seems, if possible, even more problematic. It is also clear from the outset that Kendrick Smithyman’s translations from Italian, by a New Zealand poet who did not speak Italian, are a very special case. Campana To Montale: Versions From the Italian contains 211 poems by fourteen Italian modernist poets, ranging from the troubled isolate Dino Campana to Nobel laureate Salvatore Quasimodo, rendered into English by Smithyman. These ‘versions’, as he preferred to call them, were mainly the products of his late career, and many were completed after his retirement from the University of Auckland in 1987.
            The initial impulse seems to have been Smithyman’s dissatisfaction with some literal translations by Mary and Walter de Rachewiltz in a 1968 dual Italian/English issue of Poetry Australia (22/23), which he read in the early 1980s. However, his first ‘I could do better’ response to the clumsiness he perceived went far beyond a case of simple dismissal. It would play a role in more than a decade of his life.

            No other New Zealand poet has had such a substantial involvement with European poetry or with poets writing in another language. While the first step might have been the product of a momentary reaction, it is evident that the following engagement was anything but haphazard. As observed by Jack Ross in his introduction to Campana to Montale, the project became a ‘nightmare of industry’. For each of the chosen poems, Smithyman typed out the Italian text with a literal translation underneath and dictionary definitions down the side. This first page, in turn, was succeeded by a second with an initial English version, which was furthered worked to hone meaning, and produce line-breaks and scansion.
            Smithyman ended up translating nearly half of Salvadore Quasimondo’s complete output — 132 out of 195 poems — as well as large chunks of Eugenio Montale and Sandro Penna. They were accompanied by smaller selections from the works of other poets which, in sum, constitute a complete overview of the modernist poetic movement in Italy.
            Campana To Montale is a substantial and noteworthy addition to the corpus of Italian poetry in English. It is focused, yet comprehensive within those bounds. It gives a clear insight into more than half a century of writing. It is not the work of a dilettante. But Smithyman’s texts also produce far more questions than have been answered, even in the excellent essays by Ross and Marco Sonzogni that introduce and accompany the Edizione Joker edition. 
            Was such a labour really the product of a casually caused reaction? Was Smithyman’s involvement with Italian modernist poetry and poetics merely a matter of chance? Was it sustained purely by a hunt-and-peck exercise in dictionary translation much like doing a cryptic crossword in two languages? No matter how beguiling these questions might be, currently we have no real answers beyond the body of work. And such questions also avoid an obvious observation: these poems are some of Smithyman’s finest work.
            Evaluation of a poet’s oeuvre is not something that comes immediately. Things need time to settle. In Smithyman’s case this is further compounded by sheer volume. His self-selected Collected Poems (now easily accessible in toto, via: http://www.smithymanonline.auckland.ac.nz/) number some 1500 poems, even with the exclusion of ‘several hundreds’, some previously published.
            The place of the translations of Campana To Montale in this extensive output would initially appear minor — but for their outstanding quality. They have now been published in two countries: from The Writer’s Group in Auckland, New Zealand in 2004 and, in 2011, from Edizione Joker in Novi Ligure, Italy. They cannot be easily shuttled to the secondary place we so frequently reserve for a poet’s translations.
            In contradistinction to Smithyman’s vastly referential middle and late works, these translations are rich with deceptively simple wonders, stripped down to the bare bones, often stark, but always vivid.  There is, to take the most obvious example, ‘The Eel’:

            The eel, siren
            of the chill seas, quits the Baltic
            making for our seas,
            our estuaries, our rivers,
            flogging through the deeps, below the unfriendly flood
            from branch to branch and then
            from creek to stream, now waterways spreading like hairs,
            always pushing on further, into the very heart
            of the rock, slimed fine and easing
            through muddy creases . . .
                                                              (Eugene Montale: ‘The Eel’/’L’anguilla’)

            It is one of any number of eye-blinkingly good versions in Campana to Montale:

            Green on an unmoving sea, 
            islands where I used to live.

            Dried weeds, marine fossils,
            the beach where in their mating season sped
            horses of volcanoes and the moon . . .
                                                         (Salvadore Quasimondo: ‘Moon Horses and Volcanos’/   
            ‘Cavalli di luna e di vulcani’)

These translations encompass a wide range of poets and their responses to a world. There are the melancholy gay observations of Sandro Penna:

            Shadow of a light-footed cloud
            led me to a boy
            who came up from the fast-running river
            to stretch out naked on the grass . . .
                                                      (Sandro Penna, Untitled, L’ombra di una nuvola… , p. 52)

And Guiseppe Ungaretti’s almost-imagist, broken syntaxed condensations:

            A whole night long
            cast down beside,
            to
                 a mate butchered
            there
                             with his insulted mouth
            turned to the full moon
                             with the congestion
            of his hands
            making their way
            into my silence,
                          I have written
            letters full of love.
                                                 (Guiseppe Ungaretti: ‘The Vigil of Ungaretti’/‘Veglia’)

             Smithyman’s Italy is a locale of sharp images, taut phrases, and hard-edged summer light. At times, these translations have an almost cinematic quality. Shores are moon-crazed. Horizons withdraw. Anguish bursts into flame. In tone, they are often compressed and dramatic action-epics. Strangely, too, these poems are often not so much translated into English as they are transferred into a very New Zealand vernacular.
            They are filled with words and locutions like: ‘shelter-belt’, ‘the wind bares the kids’ submissive heads’, ‘our gullies’, ‘a mate butchered’, ‘the sun now wallops them’ – and the redolent ‘We shall have to put away the beach gear’. The recognitions by a New Zealand reader are unending. At times, it is almost as if we are exploring a great body of previously undiscovered New Zealand verse. They show us ourselves in a strange but very beguiling mirror. They make us ache for more translations by other New Zealand poets, granting us something most other cultures have experienced in full, a poetry enriched by exterior views painstakingly framed in a local perspective.
            Again, the position of Campana To Montale in Smithyman’s poetic career comes to the foreground. They are anomalous in his works and they force us to examine his own decisions in his own poetry, multifaceted as it was. It is possible to see them as a bright lance into ‘what could have been’, if Smithyman had not been dominated by the consequences of the nationalist project that had governed a century of New Zealand poets and poems. Their condensation, set against the sprawl of Smithyman’s own productions, the intensity of their vision, the multiple viewpoints, their tautness, and the lick and the turn of their relished language, all take these poems a long way from the discursive baseline of a late modern and early postmodern antipodean tradition.
            They inevitably produce a readerly desire that Smithyman had proceeded their way, rather than to the dead-ended, sometimes bloated, frequently derivative, and ultimately provincial gaze that is so evident in the exactly contemporaneous Atua Wera and Imperial Vistas Family Fictions, immense enterprises though they are. It is even possible to suggest, paradoxically, that the traditionally regarded bonds of translation here represent freedom for Smithyman: freedom from a nation at the back end of nowhere, freedom from an insular subject and inwardly turned received poetics, and freedom, ultimately, from himself.
But finally, it is their quality and power that should be our focus. In a century of poet’s translations, from Pound to Lowell to Heaney, Smithyman more than holds his space. His recreation of the poetry of another nation is alluring. His ‘nightmare of industry’ is successful. The works remain vividly in mind. The relocation of the poems by the translator is exactly achieved.
            It is to our benefit that these versions exist, but it is also our loss that Smithyman could not finally transfer this marvellously attained achievement to benefit his own self-authored works. This world of ‘could-have-been’ – compact, compressed, vibrant, and profound – must stand as one of the great lessons of late twentieth-century New Zealand poetry.


DAVID HERKT is a television director and researcher. A collection of his poetry, The Body of Man, was published by Hazard Press.