Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

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.

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.