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Cross-currents: Seven Recent Poetry Collections

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David Eggleton
Mama Mortality Corridos, by Lisa Samuels (The Holloway Press, 2010), 54 pp., $200.00; Echolocation, by Angela Andrews (Victoria University Press, 2007), 56 pp, $25.00; Since June, by Louise Wallace (Victoria University Press, 2009), 64 pp, $25.00; Tapa Talk, by Serie Barford (Huia Press, 2007) 64 pp $ 22.00; Crumple, by Vivienne Plumb (Seraph Press, 2010), 80 pp.,$25.00; Time Traveller, by Robin Fry (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 2010), 80 pp., $28.00; Sleepwalking in Antarctica and Other Poems, by Owen Marshall (Canterbury University Press, 2010), 88 pp, $25.00.

Sigmund Freud suggested that dreaming is a form of writing; in Lisa Samuels’ poetry collection Mama Mortality Corridos, writing is a form of dreaming. Strumming the keyboard, she’s a virtuoso of the dream-song. On first encounter, the reader’s kept permanently off-balance by the dizzying run-on phrases, the racing pulse of the tempo, the vertiginous absence of referents that adhere. Page by page, she offers Rorschach blots of language, inviting us to tease out the enigmatic and the elliptical, not so much into narratives as into states of emotion. The meanings of her lines wriggle about like creatures escaping from a reptile zoo, scuttling into crevices with a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t quickness — skipping, that is to say, between possible interpretations.
            Mama Mortality Corridos is a fine-press limited edition, beautifully presented, and both designed and hand-printed by craft-printer Tara McLeod, who restores the status of the book to that of a tactile object, rich beneath one’s fingertips. Published by Auckland’s Holloway Press, it’s also distinguished in a New Zealand context by its use of American spellings — ‘labor’ — and by its implied American intonations, as well as by its incorporation of verse lines in Spanish, taken from the poetry of the Spanish Catholic mystic Saint Teresa of Avila.
            An established American poet who has been teaching at the University of Auckland since 2006, Lisa Samuels writes in an American transcendentalist tradition that takes in such contrarians as Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein and Kathy Acker. Language is placed in the service of assertions of selfhood and a feminist consciousness, but at the same time the notion of a single selfhood and a single centre of consciousness is undermined, or at least contested:
                       
                        The ground is a form of elliptical impediment
                        words like eye blinks . . .
                        your arms might be united
                        with the apples. the tables, greeting
                        clouds, the fabric
                        uttering over your head
                        soft rooms, the pillows of birds
                        in the leaf curtains . . .
                                    (‘And passing by a corner’)


            Imagistic, yet combining mixed pronouns, mixed dictions, and collage effects all the way, her poems are assemblages of echoes and glimpses, ever on the point of dissolution or dissonance, though never quite succumbing. Phrases fingerpost the ordinary business of ordinary lives: ‘our best meal’, ‘stolen . . . umbrella’, ‘bejewelled anatomy’, but Samuels programmatically unsettles any expectations of domestic dramas of the kitchen sink variety. One is reminded of assorted schools of hermeticism that have been and gone, and inevitably of the American ‘Language’ poets currently flourishing on academic creative writing course curriculums in the United States, with their manifesto-like, aggressive demonstrations of linguistic uncertainty theorems.
            This is a collection in which everything is happening in the continuous present, invoking Joycean stream-of-consciousness, and even Surrealism’s automatic writing — but a closer examination of poems suggest that the ‘accidental’ poem has in fact been carefully crafted. The ‘elliptical’, the savage phrasal cut-ups, may mimic the darting consciousness and irrational urges of subconscious impulses barely kept in check, but the closed circuits of these poems are also jolted by, and fizz with, acute verbal energies, which sustain their momentum through the ostensible knitting and unknitting of neuroses, their enactments of disorder, dysfunction, impenetrable solipsism and naked ideology.
            Not only do her lines invariably strike the ear harmoniously, but she also sustains the moodiness of her cadences — their weird, spectral emotionalism. Her word lists are intended to be ‘awkwardly/ pervasive’, to invoke the forbidden, a sense of taboo; but they do so in service of a scepticism about language’s capacity to transmit a dictionary exactness of meaning. This twitchy restlessness can produce obsessive dramatic monologues, such as the poem ‘Mouth’, with its implicit air of morbid eroticism: ‘Rain in my lover’s/ mouth as I hold it open.’ What jealous fit has led to this corpse-like moment, so reminiscent of Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’?
            To confirm that the sum total of this collection is all of a piece with the implicit fetishisation of literature the book itself insists on, one simply has to pull at any given thread of imagery, then trace it through. For Samuels, the medieval fervour of Catholic mysticism becomes, in our medicated era, the breathless fervour of belief in the polysemous text providing endless possibilities for ecstatic witnessing, with closure itself endlessly deferred. In other words, writing in a high style, employing a kind of abstract expressionism of language — ‘(Poetry) must be abstract,’ said Wallace Stevens — Samuels encourages us to surrender to the trance of syllables. For proof, examine the iterations of a motif word, such as ‘mouth’ — and associated mentions of air and breath — occurring in poem after poem: ‘the mouth becomes alive’, ‘air expands inside your chest’, ‘a cloud cover over her mouth’, ‘children go by every pore open, their mouths/ open’, ‘fresh circles around his mouth’, ‘the line of the mouth starts creeping suffused’, ‘mouths in a straight line’, ‘straight to her mouth’, and so on, as if words might indeed effect some ‘ransom of the flesh’, redeeming inevitable corporeal decay: a standard trope of metaphysical uplift in verse since the Elizabethans (think of Shakespeare’s Sonnets), and — more grotesquely — the Jacobeans.

***


 If, steeped in literary theory, Mama Mortality Corridos is an echo-locator of a certain kind, Echolocation, by Angela Andrews is a first collection with a different philosophical slant but some similar concerns. In this series of rites-of-passage poems, Andrews offers slices of life through veiled anecdotes that are always acoustically sensitive, often sounding out syllables with the cool precision of someone demonstrating piano scales. She recalls working as a medical intern at Grey Hospital on the West Coast, with its ‘rivers that swell like an anaphylactic throat/ and just as asphyxiating’ (‘Grey Hospital’). In another poem, she gestures at her state of pregnancy: ‘These fists and elbows/ are dodging your grip, won’t be described.’ (‘28 Weeks’). She writes also about growing up in Rotorua and Auckland with a matter-of-factness at once keen-eyed and keen-eared.
            Other poems deal with family displacement and migration. A Xmas tree is festooned with ‘lights from Holland’. Holland itself is a place constructed out of stories told by grandparents: ice-skating on a canal which is ‘a long tract of ice/. . . incising the horizon’ (‘Opa’); the Dutch language has the ‘intimacy/ of a chronic cough’ (‘Grandparents’); her grandmother’s baking offers ‘variations/ of cinnamon, butter and clove . . . covered in silver almonds’ (‘Oma’). Such familial unities link to life’s continuum of deaths and births, and her own training as a doctor; her father’s death from a heart attack is followed by the description of a heart sealed in perspex in a pathology museum.
            All in all, these are wry, understated, well-crafted and sharply observed poems that constitute a kind of ‘sentimental education’ in verse form.


 ***


If Angela Andrews has adopted a careful, watchful persona for her chronicle, in Since June, Louise Wallace, who, like Andrews is a recent graduate of the VUW creative writing course, chooses in her debut collection a more mercurial register. Her voice is by turns comic, knowing, tentative and questioning; and she constructs and draws our attention to her poems as potential try-outs for longer narratives, highlighting the investigative bravura of her inventions, which seem to be built up of conversational fragments, recollections, anecdotes and memos to self.
            They carry tonal echoes of their various locations — high school, the East Cape, Wellington — and feature a curious cast, including ‘gypsies’, ‘freaks’, a girl called Fanny Adams, the Poi Girls (‘They lean/ on the fence and watch you/ walk past — spinning, twirling their poi’). Here, semi-earnest, semi-comic, are the adventures and misadventures of childhood and adolescence, as well as a kind of sub-Gothic macabre that ranges from a missing cat to various phobias and uncertainties:
           
            My arms are outstretched, waiting
            for the ceiling to burst,
            the water to fall
            the current to show me
            the way . . . (‘The History of Water’)
           
            Her poems often have a spondaic lilt, a tripping quality, a raw-boned processional sense, as they attempt to pin down experience — or else to elude pinning down experience by focussing on what the pinning-down-with-a-poem process entails: ‘if you like the harmonica you keep on playing/ though it may seem a frivolous instrument to some’ (‘At the Impasse’).
            Everywhere, there are ghostly flickers and reflections resembling the self-image she glancingly sees reflected in the window on a long-distance bus-ride in winter; the ‘silvery-dead countryside/ whizzing by my window’ parallels an inner numbness, on a symbolic journey out of adolescent crisis and into a sense of responsibility and control.

***


 Serie Barford’s poems in Tapa Talk similarly share aspects of the confessional mode, but in a less occluded fashion, as she looks back on the identity crisis she experienced as a young Pacific Islander from a working-class background attending university. However, she is less looking back with nostalgia than interrogating her younger self — as well as the cultural attitudes of the 1970s — on her way towards constructing a personal ethnopoetics for the twenty-first century.
            She strives to be a seeker after the sonic resonances of tonal shifts between the Polynesian family of languages and the standard English inculcated in her through her education as a standard New Zealander.
            ‘The sun is one of our emotive nouns’, wrote W.H. Auden. Barford goes in search of the sun as a symbol, the way, for example, as time’s agent it cures skin like a hide, and the way it colours people into ethnic stereotypes. Skin blemishes are an identity marker:

            born the night of the comet
            my cousin’s child had
            birth marks like bruises
            with indistinct edges
                        (‘Mongolian Spots’)

            There’s a constant undertow, or undercurrent, of sensuality, too, in Barford’s musings, a haptic sense one might associate with hands-on tapa cloth making:

            all the paper in the village
            sweats with humidity
            resists ink and lead
            from hibiscus-coloured pens
                        (‘The Sabattier Effect’)

Emphatically chromatic — parrots have ‘scarlet splashes above their beaks/ as splendid as the dripping harlequin blooms’ (‘Rain on Ouvea’) — Barford triangulates the South Pacific, using Auckland as one corner as she travels between islands, to confirm a Polynesian identity, in which ripeness is all.

***


Vivienne Plumb, in her collection of poems entitled Crumple, is the epitome of the modern traveller, but one alert to contemporary life’s absurdist moments. Her poems about just passing through incorporate local colour, chance and the accidental, but also retail the arrival procedures and departure protocols that are the same everywhere. Somewhat like a wittily self-aware bag lady, her poems stack details up as if in a shopping trolley’s omnium gatherum.
            One poem details instructions given for minding her house while she’s away; another poem lists instructions received for gaining entry to various kinds of accommodation — in Poland: ‘Be careful on the apartment stairs in Blick Street/ there is no elevator and the lights will go out’. Her travels take in Sydney: ‘I used to live here on B. Street/ thirty-five years ago .  . .’; and Italy: ‘We do not have these shops at home’; China: ‘Shanxi/ smells of tea and yellow earth’; and Wellington: ‘Abandoned furniture sits at/ lonely intervals along the street’; and Rotorua: ‘The earth’s crust is so thin here/ and Rotorua you smell/ but I still love you, baby.’
            Hithering and thithering, indefatigably examining people, signage and happenings for poetic possibilities, Plumb ends up constructing an engaging, frequently amusing, occasionally ramshackle, assemblage of global flotsam and jetsam.

***


Robin Fry’s book of poems, Time Traveller, is rather more uneven, but a handful of poems are memorable — that is, they linger in the mind, neither inoffensive garden-variety tidy verses, nor offensive garden variety displays of unweeded emotion, but rather demonstrations of skillful formal execution and fertile invention. The rhapsodic ‘Hurry’ celebrates kissing with a kind of forlorn romantic echo reminiscent of a Leonard Cohen lyric: ‘kiss him before the agave blooms/ before the mistral blows’; while the poem entitled ‘Finding poems’ hints at self-mockery, even while it affirms the need for self-expression:

            Unseen behind a mountain hut,
            a tramper reaches in rapture
            towards the marbled sky,
            searches a pocket
            for the stub of pencil she
            usually keeps there . . .

            Poetry, Robin Fry, confirms, is a mansion with many rooms, many discourses — a site for inclusion rather than exclusion. Testing that humanist notion of permission, she delivers the linguistically permissive ‘Shipboard Romance’, a story told using an alphabetical acrostic. It’s another poem that seems in a hurry, but the point it makes is that a poem can use poetic licence to create its own logic, its own cycle of time:

            Able to please himself, he went from Alba to Cadiz
            boats were his passion, he would never fly . . .
            Zachariah ran to meet them with his girlfriend Anna.


***



Despite its title, Owen Marshall’s second collection of poems, Sleepwalking in Antarctica, is grounded in the South Island. He waxes lyrical over the Mainland’s high summer, the three shades of yellow found in flowering lupin, broom and gorse, respectively (‘Golden Age’), and is equally celebratory of mid-winter: the cat lifting its paws high, like a ‘Lipizzaner stallion’, as it crosses a frost-covered paddock; the effects of a snow storm on an old macrocarpa tree: ‘Boughs thicker than a rugby waist tore/ and snapped.’

            All manner of things entrance him, from coastal drizzle’s ‘drifting dewy breath’, to sparrows roosting in a tree outside his office window, but these ‘things’ are not random, rather they are the occasion for epiphanies, fables, moments of illumination.
            Marshall fossicks for axioms and truths amongst everyday encounters and events in order to craft poems as exquisite as top-shelf miniatures or cross-hatched thumb-nail sketches. Writing about his visit to Antarctica in January 2010, his concern is less with the great white wonder without than with how people interact with one another within the local watering hole, before ‘emerging at midnight into blinding/ sun.’
            Poems about a medical examination, his father, his brother, his uncle, his own exploits as a callow boy in the manner of callow boys the world over suggest the collection could be seen as the masculinist poems of a Southern man — ‘The taste of chlorine as/ smooth promise on a young woman’s skin’ — but if the poetic rhetoric is delivered from a male perspective, it only points to a more sophisticated or more subtle purpose, one imbued with an understanding of the human comedy, as the poem ‘Five Dreams for Freud’ confirms:

            I am to sing for President Reagan . . .
            I horseback a Kalahari pygmy child . . .
            I am running against the hurricane . . .
            I am facing armed assassins . . .
            with a toilet duck . . .
            I announce the discovery of
            a new primary colour . . .

Marshall’s poems are acts of self-interrogation, or perhaps self-recognition, which end up providing if not credos then catechisms. He is a scrupulous Everyman, one setting the points and confirming the calibrations on a personal moral compass, even as he swiftly sketches rich character studies in a handful of lines.
            The last poem in his collection, ‘Ending with Shakespeare’ is a character study of an elderly and ill South African academic who has ended up in New Zealand. It’s a kind of obituary, but it’s told in Marshall’s characteristic elegiac tone of voice as a poker-faced game of literary allusions. Thus, the droll humour serves to reveal a communality: the narrator watches as the hospital ward lights go out to the booming echoes of the English poetry canon recited by a dying man. The psychoanalysis is in the poetry.

DAVID EGGLETON is the editor of Landfall Review Online. His most recent poetry collection, Time of the Icebergs, was published by Otago University Press in 2010.

Concept albums: Three recent poetry collections

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Nicholas Reid
Cassino – City of Martyrs/Citta Martire, by Robert Sullivan (Huia Publishers, 2010), 85 pp., $29.95; Something in the Waters, by John Horrocks (Steele Roberts, 2010), 64 pp., $24.99; In Vitro, by Laura Solomon (HeadworX, 2011).

I applaud attempts to celebrate or mourn public events in poetry, like the late Bill Sewell’s Ballad of Fifty-one. But public poetry is a treacherous beast. It is easy for the big public statement to sound bogus and it is easy for the poet to become a grandstander, taking credit for fine thoughts derived from other people’s sufferings or achievements.
            Does Robert Sullivan’s Cassino escape these snares?
            Partly.
            Cassino is a connected sequence of sixty-seven short poems, often called Waiata and sometimes referred to as Cantos. They are fired by the theme of the battle of Monte Cassino in World War II, where the Maori Battalion was part of a sustained and bloody action around the mountain-top abbey. The blurb tells us Sullivan’s grandfather soldiered in Italy, so Sullivan’s connection is personal as well as cultural.
            The sixty-seven poems are numbered with Roman numerals. Sullivan jokes about the poncy-ness of this in the Waiata ‘Empire’ (‘What’s with the Roman numbering, eh?’), and further jokes about his failure to use the Roman ‘L’ (for fifty) in the one called ‘Counting’. Such joking is typical of the word-play and defensive irony now de rigueur for poets who approach a Big Theme but want to avoid being thought pretentious.

            The whole sequence leans on spiral imagery. The spiral refers to koru, but also: to the road up to the summit of Monte Cassino; to curlicues in illuminated medieval manuscripts; to decorative tops of Greek columns; to the twisting of the wind, whether the wind-god is Tawhirimatea or Aeolus; to the wayward course of history and human affairs; and perhaps to the path up Dante’s Mount Purgatory. There are many pairings of Maori and European mythology, and many reminders that there was once a shrine to Apollo on the site of the mountain-top monastery. Canonical poets are referenced liberally: Dante, Rilke, Curnow, Tuwhare — and Ezra Pound, who must now be acknowledged by anyone who presumes to write Cantos. (Though Pound also has to be ticked off for his ‘racism, his anti-Semitic, anti-African rants’.)
            In sum, this appears modelled on a war poem like David Jones’ In Parenthesis, buttressed by the heavy machinery of mythology, religion and literary allusion. Yet when all this impressive machinery is noted, how successful are these sixty-seven poems as poems?
            The very first poem in the sequence delivers one really pithy line (‘this war’s oldest graves are young’) but also makes observations that seem to have strayed from a travel diary or tourist’s blog. Removing lineation, some of them read:  ‘I took photos of the granite block left by the Returned Services Association, at a mound to the side of the platform beside the memorial for Italians…the view stretching from the abbey was stupendous, right across valley and city to the next mountain…’
            ‘Stupendous’? Words like that descend with the leaden thump of banality.
            Some Cantos are brief, focused, heartfelt and all the better for it. Take the simplicity of ‘Bella’, which I quote in full:

            La vita e bella! Beautiful life brings so many faces
            and hearts to hand and mind: strong wide teeth, sharp noses,
            gripping fingers, macho smiles, gracious manners,
            rough and fine steps, whistles and tunes, kisses and hair:
            these words on a t-shirt bring these to me and you.

            And then there are those that return to tourist-talk, ill-digested High Culture and late invocations of aroha, the Treaty and New Zealand politics, which do not really spring from the sequence’s central concerns.
            I have the impression of a concept album that forgets the concept. Some parts are better than the sum.

***

John Horrocks’ Something in the Waters is both objet d’art and volume of poetry. Poetic reflections on Rotorua, its lakes, its baths, its history and its tourism are presented with many reproductions of modern and archival photos, old tourist brochures and a four-page prose essay about Dr Wohlmann, who advised on the construction of Rotorua’s thermal bath-house a century ago.
            Pictures and text are in conversation.
            On page 10 there is a poem about Maori harvesting food from the lake in the early twentieth century, and opposite, on page 11, is the very photograph on which the poet is commenting. Thus throughout the volume. This reflective combination of picture and verse is in an honourable tradition at least as old as Blake, and publishers Steele Roberts have served Horrocks’ concept well with a superior piece of book production. In just one or two poems, Horrocks’ imagery would be rather obscure if we did not have the adjoining picture to illuminate us. Would I have understood Dr Wohlmann’s cartographical concerns (p. 46) without the map (p. 47) to show me what he was on about?
            Horrocks explores his own childhood memories of the town and lake, the way the lake has suffered recent pollution, and differing tourist perceptions of Rotorua in the past and in the present. What is most admirable is his complete lack of condescension. The past is not patronised in easy cultural judgment. A long sequence of poems (‘The Man in the Aix Bath’) creates the thoughts of a tourist undergoing a ‘cure’ in 1908. The way was open for Horrocks to satirise the quackery of the gadgets involved in spa treatments back then, or perhaps the Eurocentric perspectives of Edwardian tourists. Instead he moves his sequence on to the present day, making it perfectly clear that tourist perspectives are tourist perspectives in any age,  and each age will seek its own version of the ‘miracle cure’.
            The poem ‘Two famous bathers’ is a witty comment on current tourist-town  commerce and ‘Passing Travellers’ interrogates the whole process of making poetry out of a place.

***

After Cassino and Something in the Waters, it is interesting to turn to a volume that is not organised around a central concept. A volume of individual poems, in other words.
            Not that Laura Solomon’s In Vitro is un-organised. Although there are no headings to tell us so, the poems are clearly arranged in groups according to subject matter. Three poems about pregnancy and child-bearing are followed by two about animals (dog, fox), two about performers (magician, tiger-tamer), three about more marginalised animals (spider, crow, vampire bat) and so on, up to two final poems anticipating death.
            Solomon favours the style of direct address in the first-person singular (‘I’) or plural (‘We’). At its worst, this can lead to the rant of ‘The Poet Leaves the Table’, which begins as complaint at poets’ lack of reward and recognition, but loses focus and ends as general tirade, attempting to hit too many targets. The first-person approach is also conducive to the easy irony of dramatic monologue, in which the poet puts detestable ideas into the mouth of a first-person speaker, as in ‘In Vitro’, with its endorsement of clinical, artificial creation of life befitting Brave New World, or a poem in which Janet Frame’s adversaries rejoice at having successfully lobotomised her.
            Laura Solomon’s literary allusions are few and commendably unobtrusive, but they are there, with Wordsworth’s daffodils and Charon the Ferryman popping up in ‘In Bloom Mark II’ ; a distant echo of Ted Hughes in ‘Crows’; and perhaps Thunder Rock and Yeats’ (or Eliot’s) winding stair informing ’The Latest Lighthouse Keeper’. More often, Solomon prefers brash pop culture referencing. The name-checking of Kaiser Soze in ‘Blighty Wounds’ had me straining to remember the movie The Usual Suspects, and for ‘The Ghost of Roy Sullivan Laments’, I had to look up Wiki to find out who Roy Sullivan was. Presumably Solomon did this too, as she quotes Wiki directly. 
            This is an accessible volume from a poet who is clearly not up herself, and enjoys communicating with her readers. Or maybe listeners. I suspect much of In Vitro would go down best as live-performance poetry with its direct address, repetitions and the type of chant that concludes ‘Closing Time in the Pub at the End of the Mind’:

                        We’re what’ll be left at the end of time,
                        we’re staccato rhythm and corny rhyme,
                        we’re all the things you’d never want to find.

_________________________________________________________________________________
NICHOLAS REID is an Auckland-based historian, critic, reviewer and poet. His books include The University of Auckland: The First 125 Years.

Worm in the Apple

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Robert McLean
The stunning debut of the repairing of a life, by Leigh Davis (Otago University Press, 2010), 216 pp., $39.95

Our stock of available reality not only has been more or less stopped being added to, it is rapidly shrinking, and what remains of it also is becoming costlier. The stunning debut of the repairing of a life by the late Leigh Davis is one of those increasingly rare books that not only dares to but succeeds in augmenting our stuff of life. It is a humbly ambitious work of wide scope and deep integrity. If, as Wittgenstein suggested, the ethical is fundamentally a question of an individual’s attitude when regarding the world-as-it-is, Davis’s book is quietly powerful enough to prompt the reader to question perspectives informing their own normative outlook. And it is in this regard that Davis’s The stunning debut can be considered the finest long poem published by a New Zealander since Smithyman’s Atua Wera.
            It gets under way with a proem in which Davis provides a statement of intent: ‘I want contemporary forms, that is, to do something new. /I don’t want novelty but archaic ingenuity.’ This amounts to an honorific idea of poetry – or at least of what it ought to be: a desire for poems that are, amongst other ends, self-evaluative of an imagined life. It is a project that is greatly distanced from the young Leigh Davis’s iconoclasm, the provocative brio that informed him when he founded the journal And and the Jack Books imprint and through it issued his first book Willy’s Gazette. Wystan Curnow, whose own Cancer Daybook came to mind when I was reading The stunning debut, reports Davis felt that it seemed ‘increasingly clear that the old world—medieval, or more strictly post-Classical, thought—supplies major aspects of visual art’s contemporary meaning,’ to which Curnow appends the comment that Davis’s view applied ‘not just visual art either. If there was one idea that separated the later writings from the earlier, that was it’ (Journal of New Zealand Literature, Spring 2010).
            As a student of modernism – of Pound and Joyce and Williams and so on – that Davis would arrive at such a view is hardly surprising. His redemptive archaeologies are tempered with scepticism derived from the American Language poets and post-structuralist theory, but similar doubt is evident in certain totems of the Pound era, as in, for instance, Dante, even at his most beatific: ‘How weak are words, and how unfit to frame/My concept…/Eternal light’ (Paradiso, Canto XXXIII). In Davis’s words, it is ‘(d)yslexia, or that trouble, again: original meaning arriving with more pressure or insistence through confusion in the signs’ (‘Bearing Witness’ – Davis on Stephen Bambury’s Siena Paintings, February 2001): the bewildered and complainant body, seen for its telling humours and perennial dislocations, is the vessel and terrain for the journey back, the voyage home. Language is crafted into a vessel with which to sail a katabasis to the sea of death. Davis’s usages of synecdoche, both pars pro toto and totum pro parte, make this subject and its object seem as boundless and unknowable as constantly-shifting seascapes and language themselves.
            The section of the book following the proem consists of facsimiles of a notebook kept by Davis during his recuperation after serious brain surgery. A specialist of brain trauma or a student of linguistics would be more likely to offer worthwhile assessments of these than I can do, for whom they offer little more than curiosities of biographical circumstance. But insofar as modernism’s ‘etherised patient’ is remade and re-rendered as nonfigurative by medical realities, these higgledy-piggledy notations, gradually moving towards coherence and informed acceptance, provide evidence of the sad worldliness and trauma from which  repairing of a life was made. Think of the serious illness John Donne suffered in 1623, which produced similar concerns: in ‘Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness’ the poet considers his destination as if he himself is a vessel that may reach the desirable places of this world and other, but only by negotiating some painful straits. His conceit seeks to catch the working of providence itself, which shapes human accidents in patterns of timeless truth. More recently, C.K. Stead’s collection, The Black River (i.e. the river Styx), was written after a stroke had left its author dyslexic for a time. Crested on life’s whelming finitude, many of the poems seem to project a desire to look back, to take stock, and, not unusually for Stead, to settle accounts and scores. The modernists’ anaesthetised bodies – deranged or sick selves and society – provide Davis with a means and a tradition with and in which to operate.
            Yet, in contrast with Stead, it appears Davis had a rather more conciliatory purpose. I: Know God (Soft Structure), the book’s first section after the notebook reproductions, consists of a gentle Lucretian meditative sequence, a De rerum natura, which is characterised by supple and patient movements of mind, both in and through language, and in and through life. It resists paraphrase and necessitates a lightness of touch in response. Refuge and integrity are found in luminal abstractions and focused particulars. The language is open to the world and graceful in contending with it. Although it often skirts near to sentimentality, it never quite tips over into it; given such propriety, it is free of the standardised post-Language school diction, one that has rapidly become homogenised far beyond cliché, both saccharine and mouldy, that one often encounters when reading ‘experimental’ writing. Words are refreshed by the poet’s precision and lack of assumption, as is the world from which words ultimately derive.
            The final sequence refocuses Davis’s poetry outwards and down into Odyssean actualities. The myth kitty, given its lack of bite and myriad of infections, is generally shooed off, and usually this is for the best. And although the culminating section seemed less fulfilled and more contingent than the preceding sequence, nonetheless, though only after several revisitings, its correlative significance clarified and became resonant.  Far from the first time, Homer’s wilily luckless persistent navigator is called on to provide directions, to demonstrate proper conduct, and to translate the inscrutable terms of providence. In no way is this novel; rather, it is original, like reading your father’s or grandfather’s diary.
            This review warrants an apology – albeit one that is soundly qualified.  I have made few quotes from the text, and possibly not offered enough of the expected sense of ‘what it’s like.’ Indeed, I have made more from other sources than the book at hand. And yet I haven’t been able to resist this turn. Davis’s is an old book, almost old beyond words: it is filled with echoes; perhaps it contains nothing but echoes. And my reading of it has been ghosted by many voices. While I have been writing my response to Stunning debut, I have felt like I imagine it would feel to review, say, The Book of Job, Grimm’s Fairytales, or Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. These are bottomless texts. They are texts about which one could write an endless amount of different readings. And there have been many re-readings and many rewritings. Deadlines have come and gone. In the end, to borrow Wittgenstein’s words, let it be said that ‘this book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it – or similar thoughts’, which, in my view, is every reader, if they are prepared to admit it. It is a book to be read – nothing else will prove sufficient.
            John Newton made a provocative point when, prefacing his reading at the Home And Away trans-Tasman poetry symposium, he suggested that contemporary poets haven’t yet moved any substantial distance from the norms of Romanticism; feelings, he says, remain our poetic raison d’être. But if finding themselves under sufficient pressure or urgency, poets may find other older ways to write here and now. ‘What is most modern in our time,’ according to Guy Davenport, ‘frequently turns out to be the most archaic’ and ‘(t)he heart of the modern taste for the archaic is precisely the opposite of the Romantic feeling for ruins’ (The Geography of the Imagination, pp. 21–22): this is a perspective for which Davis has provided a timely instance. Sentimentality or swoons are not allowable when undertaking a Homeric Nekyia: Leigh Davis’s posthumous katabasis is a demonstration of both these truths: an unblinking steady-handed going down towards open water. The repairing of a life is a measured and moving retelling of a perennial story.

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ROBERT MCLEAN was born at Bethany in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1974. His poems, translations and reviews have been published in a variety of periodicals and anthologies both locally and overseas. His first collection, For the Coalition Dead, was published by Kilmog Press in 2009; For Renato Curcio (Gumtree Press) followed in 2010.

Drum Rhythms

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Sarah Jane Barnett
A Canoe in Midstream: Poems New & Old, by Apirana Taylor (Canterbury University Press, 2009), 168 pp., $25.00

At a hefty one hundred and sixty eight pages, Apirana Taylor’s fifth volume of poetry brings together new work with previously published poems. Taylor is a poet and short story writer who also writes for children and theatre. With a background in drama, much of his work has appeared in multimedia recordings. Taylor first’s collection Eyes of the Ruru was published in 1972, and it launched his voice onto the New Zealand poetry landscape. Critics have called his poetry everything from ‘raging’ to ‘meditative’. Of Maori and Pakeha descent, with affiliation to Ngati Porou, Te Whanau-a-Apanui and Ngati Ruanui, his style is often contrasted with the fluid lyricism of Hone Tuwhare.
            Taylor’s poetic style is that of simplicity. The majority of poems in A Canoe in Midstream are short and have minimal punctuation. Only a handful of poems span more than a page. The collection encompasses themes of humanity’s relationship with nature, love, life, death and magic. In Taylor’s poems, land and people are the same: the ‘mountain [has] bones’, and people are made of tree buds. One reading of the collection is that of a catalogue or celebration of New Zealand’s natural wonders: stones, flesh, morepork, totara, rimu and kahikatea; storms and islands.
            Taylor’s poems also talk about the impact of colonisation and urbanisation on Maori. At times the poems come across as angry, and with a bitter aftertaste (which is not unjustified). In his most well-known poem, ‘Sad Joke on a Marae’, the speaker, ‘Tu the freezing worker’, calls ‘Ngati D.B.’ his tribe. Taylor gives Tu this depressing mihi, and in this poem, and the other poems that hint at drunkenness and violence in Maori communities, it is difficult to tell if Taylor is sympathising with his characters or scolding them.
            Other poems have tones of retribution, such as the poem, ‘The Womb’, where the voice of the land says: ‘you settlers and farmers / return to me / and I suck on your bodies / as if they are lollipops.’ Many poems are written in Maori, which may be one of the ways Taylor honours and acknowledges his ancestry. In ‘Maori Girl’, ‘The ghosts of your ancestors tap on your / shoulders’, and I wonder if Taylor’s poems are meant to inspire Maori to discover their roots. Many retell Maori history, such as the poems ‘Kapiti’ about Te Rauparaha, and ‘Parihaka’. For Taylor all is not lost: faith wells in these poems. The poem ‘Whakapapa’ is an encouraging retelling of the Maori creation myth, and ‘God’ appears often as a comfort. In some poems, such as ‘Charteris Bay’, a gentler and lyrical style emerges:
        the inlet turned
            the languid colour of pea green soup

            lunch flowered into
            fine wine salad talk and t’ai chi …
            the day closed
            diamonds of sunlight danced across the water.

         The influence of music is clear in the drum rhythms of Taylor’s work. His poetry displays a delight in sound, repetition and patterns. The best draw image and sound together, such as the poem ‘Listen’:
        Listen to the tap tap tap
            of the carvers
            as with chisel and mallet
            they trace their genealogy.

         When performing, Taylor combines his poetry with Maori and Western instruments. Many of the poems in A Canoe in Midstream may be better suited to performance, where Taylor’s personality and presence could lift them from the page. For example the poem ‘Te Ihi’, with its breathy rhythm and repetition, begs to be heard: ‘ka ea, ka ea / it is clear, it is clear / whakapiri tonu whakapiri tonu / hold fast, hold fast.’
            The most engaging poems arrive like ‘kete’, a six-part poem that layers images of the stars into a mosaic of perspectives: ‘gypsophila / flowers / in a dark / bowl’, glitter against ‘stars / a myriad / of children / sparkling / in the night’. The poem ‘Uncle Hakaraia’ also offers a complex view of Uncle Hakaraia who was only allowed to speak English in school. ‘He was stood in the corner and made to feel / like a dumbcluck and a fool.’ The poem acknowledges the event’s emotional and cultural impact: ‘he speaks impeccable English … when he speaks of school days / his language is bitter.’
            One drawback of the collection is the lack of sections. It is unclear which work is new, and which has appeared in previous collections. It is also unclear if the poems are ordered chronologically, and this may disadvantage readers who are new to Taylor’s poetry. There are some loose thematic groupings. Poems about weaving and carving appear together, and are followed by poems about the loss of language and tradition. The centre of the book groups poems of settlement and colonisation, and the end of the collection features animal and family poems. The dedication to the collection reads: ‘these verses are paddles / to the waka / a canoe of poems / in midstream’, and while the book offers a progression of sorts, I am not sure how it reads as a collection.
            Another drawback is the length of the collection. The book would be stronger edited down to around one hundred pages. Some poems are noticeably weaker, especially those with summarising titles or punchline endings. While the brevity of some poems is reminiscent of haiku, many of the shorter poems hold no mystery and tend toward generalisation. While there is a certain power and impact in simplicity, the weaker poems make the collection feel like a work in progress. In short: most issues could be solved with a ruthless editorial eye. One poem promises, ‘words are / paltry things / so I turn them / into darts / and give them wings’, but a poem will only soar if it has the space to do so.

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SARAH JANE BARNETT is a poet and reviewer who lives in Wellington. Her reviews have appeared in The Lumière Reader, FishHead Magazine, and Victorious Magazine. Sarah is currently completing a creative writing PhD in the field of ecopoetics.

Showing Us Around Oceania

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Vilsoni Hereniko
Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English, edited by Albert Wendt, Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan (Auckland University Press, 2010) 304 pp., $49.99

In Wendt’s 1976 essay ‘Towards a New Oceania’, he wrote the following about Oceania, of which Polynesia is a part: ‘So vast, so fabulously varied a scatter of islands, nations, cultures, mythologies and myths, so dazzling a creature, Oceania deserves more than an attempt at mundane fact; only the imagination in free flight can hope – if not to contain her – to grasp some of her shape, plumage, and pain.’[i] It is hard to believe that this influential essay was written thirty-five years ago because it is just as relevant today as it was then, when a cultural renaissance was beginning to spread throughout Oceania. Wendt was one of the major catalysts for the arts during this time, and his influence in fostering and encouraging poets to create and publish was just as intense then as it is today.
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