Nicholas ReidCassino – 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.
http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2012-summer/selections/cassino-city-of-martyrs-citta-martire-by-robert-sullivan-738439/
Just thought I’d post another review here. It certainly isn’t easy to write reviews so thanks to Nicholas for taking the time to read the book. Robert Sullivan.