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.
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.
Leave a Reply