poetry – Page 34

The Life Aquatic

October 1, 2013 Leave a Comment

Vaughan Rapatahana

Night Swimming, by Kiri Piahana-Wong (Anahera Press, 2013), 50 pp., $24.99.

Ko he pukapuka o ngā whiti tuatahi tēnei nā he kaituhi ki te ingoa o Kiri Piahana-Wong. Ka nui te pai hoki kia titiro me kia rāhiri tēnei pukapuka.

[This is the first book of poems by a writer named Kiri Piahana-Wong. It’s excellent to have the opportunity to look at and appreciate this book.]

Thank you for publishing this, your first collection of poems, Kiri. I was pleasantly surprised. I think that there is certainly enough quality poetry inside the slim volume to warrant the collection too, given the inevitable first collection dilemma of whether or not a poem is quite ‘good enough’ to warrant inclusion. Some poems do struggle a bit to establish themselves either above or beneath the waves here, but there is so much more demonstrably power-swimming going on elsewhere that the book positively waves to you to dive in and wallow. And to publish via your own publishing house (Anahera Press), pushing out into the tide with some moolah from Creative New Zealand flung into the currents, is also an achievement I applaud.

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Sounding of the Heart

September 1, 2013 Leave a Comment

James Norcliffe

The Blue Coat, by Elizabeth Smither, (Auckland University Press, 2013), 68pp., $24.99.

In ‘Reading Maxine Kumin’, one of a number of bookish poems in her new collection, Elizabeth Smither alludes to that poet’s materia poetica citing ‘…The Green Well in which / a great pile-up of the spent and the dead / creates the sort of compost poems come from. From deep pity…’ It is not altogether surprising this should have resonated with Smither, for while some of the compost which generates the poems in The Blue Coat does derive from the spent and the dead — friends, relatives, even the occasional pet (Old Man Baby) — so much more derives from the pity, or more accurately her empathetic engagement with her world and all who inhabit it. Expressed another way this is the sounding of the heart she found in the very seductive William Carlos Williams she wrote of so many years, and books, ago.

Through these many books, Smither has so perfected her craft that the poems now seem effortless. The familiar voice is here: that of a wry and ever-attentive observer wearing her learning lightly; a good companion, a fellow reader, writer, and terrific conversationalist. She has a painterly eye for shape and colour, and often the poems themselves aspire to painting as in the very first poem, ‘Black Labradors’, invoking Braque and Roualt before coming to the dogs themselves: Two black Labradors on the grass / are a painting moving. Other poems are imbued with the qualities of still life painting or landscape.

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Sharp Fragments

September 1, 2013 Leave a Comment

Siobhan Harvey

Night’s Glass Table, by Karen Zelas (Interactive Press, 2012), 87 pp, $28; A History of Glass, by Bryan Walpert (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2011), 85 pp, $19.79.

‘You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul,’ wrote George Bernard Shaw (1). Glass might be title and primary subject of two fairly recent collections by New Zealand authors, Karen Zelas’ Night’s Glass Table and Bryan Walpert’s A History of Glass, but each work cleverly refracts into the symbolic, personal and emotional. In both compositions, glass becomes a signifier of representation, illumination and imitation. At times, dark, at times bright, these collections offer divergent ways of looking at their topic, each piecing together a concrete set of lyrical ideas composed through exquisitely used language; so that, like concept albums, Zelas’ and Walpert’s works shape and develop unified stories, coalescent narratives. The result in both cases is a poetry collection which is truly accessible while still retaining great depth and complexity.

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Weathered Dwelling

August 1, 2013 Leave a Comment

Denis Harold

Reflections, by Marion Jones (Steele Roberts, 2012), 80 pp., $20.

Until Marion Jones published two books of poetry in recent years, it had been difficult to come across more than a handful of her well-crafted poems. Though some of the poems in her second book, Reflections(2012), at first seemed somewhat reserved, I soon warmed to them. They have a seriousness of intent reflected in careful word placement that is similar to an artist patiently putting down on canvas what she sees in her mind’s eye. Often the picture is of a dwelling place.

Jones published her first collection of poetry, Renovations, in 2010. In layout and tone it is a companion to Reflections. They create a de-facto selected works spanning some decades, and are therefore worth exploring together.

The poet vividly describes various houses of her childhood and of the present day, their weathering by daily light, and the patina left on the surfaces of these interiors by consciousness and memory. Underlying the visible is the audible: cries and rejoinders, ancestral voices. There are echoes in several poems of the contemplative Thomas Merton and Rilke, who are also referenced in the endnotes.

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Stop Bringing your Body Round

August 1, 2013 Leave a Comment

Sarah Jane Barnett

Close to the Bone, by Charlotte Trevella (Steele Roberts), 65pp., $19.99; Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick, by Courtney Sina Meredith (Beatnik Publishing), 68pp., $24.99.

Close to the Bone is Charlotte Trevella’s second collection of poems published by Steele Roberts. Trevella has been building a name for herself as an emerging young poet while studying medicine in Auckland. In 2008 she was selected as one of the top fifteen youth poets in the world, and in 2009 she won the New Zealand Post National Schools Poetry Awards.

The poems in Close to the Bone conjure a modern and disconcerting dystopia. The imagery is uncompromising: it is a world of pornography and murdered women, where maggots feed on the leg of a dog and dead hedgehogs decay in toxic water. The flowers in one poem ‘reek of human meat’ while the lawn tries ‘to amputate’ the poet’s foot. In these poems the ‘sky, it’s an abattoir,’ and the world is ‘a whore.’

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Not Inclined to Metaphor at 3 am

July 1, 2013 1 Comment

Robert McLean

You’re So Pretty When You’re Unfaithful To Me, by David Howard, with images by Peter Ransom (Holloway Press, 2012), edition of 75, $240; this hill, all it’s about is lifting it to a higher level, by Vaughan Gunson (Steele Roberts, 2012), 64 pp., $19.99; Jumping Ship & Other Essays, by Glenn Colquhoun (Steele Roberts, 2012 )146 pp., $24.99; Memory Gene Pool, by Michael Morrissey (Cold Hub Press, 2012), 28 pp. $19.50.

Sounding a Wintersian note from the get-go, I assert that David Howard is our finest poet. That out of the way, according to the notes at the end of his marvellous the incomplete poems, ‘The whole of boredom’, the guts of You’re So Pretty…, a livre de luxe from Holloway Press, ‘responds to the graphic works of Peter Ransom.’ Via this pictorial route, Howard brings back to us or us back to the scuzzy wired punk scene of ‘80s Christchurch decades after its expiration. It was a milieu replete with ‘characters’ of the kind enquired after at boozy 40+ dinner parties: ‘what ever happened to…’

            Small-town Christchurch being what it is, I am only a few degrees of separation from the dedicatee of You‘re So Pretty.
           You’re So Pretty I remember Eddie from when I was a boy, heavily-inked, and tootling his long-suffering trumpet in the purple shadows of bronze functionaries in our hometown’s public square. Lately, after hardly a thought for 30 years or so, he is the ex-husband of a friend of my wife. Such intersections, correlations, relationships, and such like are the stuff of Howard’s book. A step this way or that, and one might think or find oneself to be in a different world.is bookended by two poems addressing its dedicatee. Between these are four shorter poems. The heart of the matter is ‘The whole of boredom’, which pivots on the phrase ‘Yes is irregular; it/upsets the order of things, being active’; ‘The soul of whoredom’, its briefer companion, does likewise on ‘No is irregular yet/sets the order.’
            Accordingly, Curnow’s “Skeleton of the Great Moa” is given the insurgent treatment more often than I care to count. Curnow is an easy target due to his impressive size; one can’t fail to score a hit. And, having gone through a book flanked by a pair of serrated hymns, I’m led to wonder, bastardising Geoffrey Hill’s poser, is Howard’s intention to dispense with grace; or to dispense, with grace? This isn’t a question of justice, of doing it, in this case ‘Eddie’, justice, but of grace. It’s sad and angry, but there’s little consolation. I can’t help but think of Eddie as Barabbas – and wonder who then is the poet elect, dispensing or withholding grace? Upon Howard’s shoulders seems to rest the weight of the word – perhaps, too, of The Word: an old concatenation, but in Howard’s case an apt one.

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