James Norcliffe
Tarot by Jake Arthur (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024), 80pp, $25; Slim Volume by James Brown (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024), 96pp, $25; In the Half Light of a Dying Day: Catullus, 2023 by C.K. Stead (Auckland University Press, 2024), 92pp, $24.99
In his second collection, Tarot, Jake Arthur uses the fascinating conceit of the tarot pack as prompts for the forty-four poems he has assembled. Fascinating firstly, because the tarot pack is itself fascinating, mysterious, and has been used since the late 18th century as a tool for divination; and secondly because the poet has harnessed the so-called occult significance of selected cards to generate small fictive character studies that are at once intriguing and subtle.
The collection opens and closes with paired poems ‘Querent (I)’ and ‘Querent (II)’, the word ‘querent’ referring to the supplicant at a tarot reading, hoping to discover what meanings the cards hold for them. The speaker in each poem is the tarot reader/interpreter. The reader suggests the subject needs to let go of scepticism, rationality and impatience and open up to the occult promise of the cards:
… Here are the cards. Put your hand on them,
Close your eyes. You don’t want to?
But you are blind with them open.
Switch off that brain of yours.
It’s very loud. It’s like a very white light.
This isn’t surgery; this is a reading.
This injunction gives the poet freedom to embrace magic and go with his imagination, a freedom Arthur eagerly takes advantage of in the subsequent poems. For example, he lets rip in the opening poem ‘Receipt’:
One bonnie day
As me and the marquesa
Got haptic in my dad’s Cherokee,
I watched a dove
Fly past the rear windscreen
Carrying a letter.
The poem is subtitled ‘Ace of Cups’ and, like all the poems, has a reference to the tarot card it was prompted by. Not being tarot adept, I looked up the card’s meaning to find that, among other things, the Ace of Cups represents new beginnings, new relationships, compassion. The poet’s inventiveness in these lines is fun: the out-of-place Scotticism, the Spanish title, the informal grammar, the very low-frequency word ‘haptic’, the demotic Cherokee, and the carrier dove; all these in the space of six short lines. As is so often in the poems, it’s hard to keep up, but we do sense the new relationship and certainly the compassion in the poem’s jaunty narrative.
Not all the poems are so surreal; in some the narrative is more conventional, accessible. The poem ‘Lost Bantam’, for example, tells of two sailors marooned on an island after a shipwreck. The central figure, Jim, mocked as effete by drunken shipmates, finds comfort and solace after glimpsing his fellow castaway’s ‘lovely pale bottom’, and the island becomes an Eden reconfigured. The prompt card is the Page of Wands, and we read that this card represents, inter alia, finding your passion.
Tarot is a performance of great skill. Each poem is full of surprises, often startling in its juxtapositions. Bright shiny, often arcane, words abound. Like the tarot readings themselves, the poems celebrate chance and unexpectedness.
The delicate, final ‘Querent’ poem, which we imagine to be personal, ends thus:
There’s no single voice.
No fact is binding.
Watch me roll the dice again.
That four: isn’t it also one, three, six?
Slim Volume is James Brown’s eighth collection, and the title is a reminder of the poet’s voice and approach: self-deprecating, playful, droll, occasionally faux-naif. It is not for nothing that Bill Manhire has likened him to the British poet Stevie Smith.
The first time I saw the sea,
I was completely enchanted.
I’d always known it existed. I’d just
never really noticed it before.
I hadn’t even gone to see it, I’d more
stumbled across it accidentally
between Foxton and Himatangi …
(opening to ‘You Don’t Know What You’re Missing’)
or:
Problem Poem
So many poems
pointing out what
the problem is.
There’s more than a hint here of Smith’s Croft in his loft, or of the poor chap who was not waving (‘Not Waving but Drowning’). The poems are clear and accessible, written in an easy conversational style, often a first-person address, presumably the poet himself. The drollery often comes with a throwaway punchline that reminds us that we should not perhaps take the poem too seriously. This is quite different from Jake Arthur’s approach. Whereas Arthur inflates his fanciful balloons to release them into the ether, Brown often inflates his balloons to puncture them with a sharp pin.
The poems, accordingly, are very entertaining, often laugh-out-loud funny. Occasionally, as in the long piece ‘Amen’—warning, pun present—or ‘Thirteen Ringtones’, the poem does little more than work variations on an idea or word: in these examples, man, or ring.
However, while there are sometimes suggestions of a stand-up routine, the poems reward re-reading. There’s a method in the clarity. The book is in four sections, and even here Brown cannot resist poking fun at the idea of sectional division. Introducing the break at the end of the first section, he writes:
This is the place where I’d
have put a section break,
if I’d included sections.
I like sections because
they give you space
to have a breather, to pause
and think about things … like
what brought you here
and what are you doing
with your life.
Of course, the message is a wry little paradox as he has included sections, but it is also another example of direct engagement with the reader, and we remember the anonymous aphorism he uses as an epigraph: Never judge a book by its reader.
Notwithstanding this apparent disdain, the first section does have a common theme of his childhood memories of growing up in Palmerston North, that much and wrongly maligned city. The jokes and throwaway lines are present in abundance as ever, but also an accuracy Brown’s readers will recognise and empathise with. There is also a tempering tenderness, a feature of so many of the poems collected here. The final stanzas from ‘Heaven’:
Athletics day, barefoot, he was always
a shoo-in. ‘A big engine,’ dad said.
I gave him my old Healing 10-speed
and his eyes 3Ded.
He said he thought he’d died
and gone to Methven.
Note how that artfully placed ‘barefoot’ gives the poem such resonance.
In his final section break comment, Brown congratulates the reader on finishing the book. There is no need: finishing the book was a great pleasure—a line Brown might wryly enjoy, but I’m being quite unironic here. Slim Volume is a most enjoyable romp.
C.K. Stead’s impressive new collection, In the Half Light of a Dying Day, has two sections. The first, ‘The Clodian Songbook (continued)’, gathers sixteen poems written since his last collection, Say I Do This: Poems 2018–2022. The second and most moving, ‘Catullus and Kezia’, comprises nearly forty poems charting the illness and eventual death of his wife and long-term partner, Kay. This collection represents a fecund outpouring of poems in a single year, 2023, which is astonishing. And such fine poems too: there is no falling away, rather the reverse.
In a recent Spinoff piece, C.K. Stead claims not to be a ‘confessional’ poet. He underscores this in the present volume by continuing to adopt the Catullus persona he initially used in the 1979 collection Walking Westward and regularly since. In these poems, as here, he distances himself further by using the third person or sometimes second person. However, again from the Spinoff article, he admits that in his Kezia/Catullus poems, real life invades the narrative.
Stead says that because of the day-to-day intensity of Kay’s final weeks, the poems practically wrote themselves. In them, he eschewed the ambiguity and layering that appeal to sophisticated poetry readers, allowing clarity, close examination and observation to take their place. This is a tad disingenuous. No poems really ‘write themselves’. Stead is a consummate craftsman, and the individual poems are meticulously organised: layout, lineation, cadence, the inevitably resonant final line, all these things are carefully attended to. Above all, the lucidity that trumps contrivance.
There is no sentiment here, just honesty. This is demonstrated movingly in ‘Not Yet’, two poems after Kezia’s death in the poem ‘Sorry’:
Wanting to die
Catullus
and ready to relax into death
as into a soft bed
or a warm bath
you are called back to life
by an idea
for this one more
small
last poem.
Is it the Muse calls you
or just the will to live
in weak disguise.
‘Not Yet’, as the collection testifies, was not the ‘last small poem’. It was followed by twenty-two further pieces, many addressed directly to Kezia in a conversation, we suspect, that will carry on.
When Dylan Thomas died, his wife, the fiery Caitlin, wrote a book Leftover Life to Kill. Caitlin Thomas lived another forty years. Karl Stead, in his early nineties, will not have such a wait. Notwithstanding, something of Caitlin Thomas’s view was echoed in the penultimate poem ‘First Light’:
Kezia’s funeral
Catullus
Was yours too
No need for another.
In the Half Light of a Dying Day is a deeply moving collection, clear-eyed and honest, from a poet of formidable power.
In summary then, three collections from writers of three generations, each in different ways on top of their game.
JAMES NORCLIFFE has published several books for young people, a novel The Frog Prince (Penguin Random House, 2023), and eleven collections of poetry, most recently Deadpan (Otago University Press, 2019) and Letter to Oumuamua (Otago University Press, 2023). In 2022 he was awarded the NZ Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in poetry and the Margaret Mahy Medal for children’s writing.
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