Tony Beyer
The Interview Rose by Elizabeth Smither (Auckland University Press, 2026), 56pp, $24.99; New Days for Old: Prose poems by James Brown (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026), 96pp, $30; The Gum Trees of Kerikeri by Lynn Jenner (Otago University Press, 2026), 64pp, $30
Readers familiar with Elizabeth Smither’s poetry, and there are many, will know what to expect from The Interview Rose, her twentieth collection: elegance and erudition, presented in finely organised stanzas. They will be prepared for the unexpected, too. And for those not familiar with Elizabeth Smither’s poetry, this sparkling volume constitutes an excellent introduction. Beginning with a near-bestiary of animal poems, including a frog, a fish or two (dead), cows and a cat, the contents range then through gardens, fashion, art and philosophy, religion and history, travel, family and friendship. These are the contents, in other words, of a lively and cultivated mind. The poet’s practised skills and perceptiveness carry the reader along on the various poetic excursions.
When it comes to erudition, Smither is adept at beguiling the reader with well-supported access to the heavier stuff. In ‘The cat and the Wittgenstein quotes’, for example, the feline in question is a genial intermediary, both emphasising and at times undercutting the Austrian philosopher’s pronouncements. While the debate taking place in the poem may be complex and serious, the tone remains playful. T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats springs to mind as an exemplar of this kind of poetic skill. A companion cat poem, ‘100 brushes of a cat’, thrives on an element of suspense:
… the underbelly, gently
a censuring look may appearand remember to avoid the paws
(I tried once and was deterred).
Few readers will have the fortitude to attempt this manoeuvre at home. Both participants, however, emerge from the experience with dignity intact.
Another mood announces itself in the first stanza of ‘Handbag’:
If I was married to a sheikh,
or part of his harem,
I would have handbag after handbag.
It’s an unlikely scenario in a mischievous piece, whose self-effacing conclusion is already belied by the forthright opening. It’s also one of a considerable number of remarkable and witty poems throughout The Interview Rose. These include ‘Daisies’, ‘Making up half-a-face’, ‘The fashion in embraces’ and the splendidly mundane ‘De-stringing beans’. A surprisingly spooky touch is bracingly found in ‘The moon that harms animals’. My list of accomplished pieces could continue, but everyone coming to the book will make their own discoveries.
There are also updates on Ruby, the poet’s much-loved granddaughter. ‘Choosing a book for Ruby’ effectively asserts the right to childhood and its perspective, so often overridden by contemporary media. With an obvious delight in family associations, Smither’s worldview and sensibility resemble those of a painter like Berthe Morisot. Women and children and everyday life matter, of course, but so do ideas and intelligence.
A small group of poems referencing Jane Austen focus, in particular, on the eponymous heroine of the novel Emma. Psychoanalysing a fictional character can be perilous for both author and reader. Smither’s aplomb is more than up to it, though, tracing the evolution of genuine emotion among the mannered distractions of nineteenth-century society. Her affinity with Austen is signified by both writers’ restraint. With Smither, this takes the form of acutely accurate imagery, plainly expressed. For instance, two women share the urgent task of making up an actor who has arrived late for a performance in ‘Making up half-a-face’, mentioned above:
the nose can be the demarcation line.
Our fingers touch as we race down the rim
like two skiers on the Matterhorn.
The theatre setting, explicit like this or implicitly appropriate to the small, scripted dramas and dialogue occurring elsewhere, locates the poems in a living, communal context. A humane and civilised poet, Elizabeth Smither repays close reading and reading aloud. While several of the poems here may be short, none of them is slight. The lasting impression is one of sustained skill and energetic curiosity, resulting in poems worthy of many return engagements.
· · ·
With a string of earlier volumes and a selected poems behind him, James Brown’s shift into prose poetry with New Days for Old: Prose poems is—as it might be described in creative industries jargon—a good career move. But there have always been heraldic patches of prose in his previous books, and indeed some of his more interesting and best poems are prose anyway. Take his well-known ‘I come from Palmerston North’ as a salient example. Yet, to me, Brown’s writing to date has had a tendency to suppress or deprecate much of what poetry can do. He is not alone in this devotion to deprecation or laconicism—it’s almost a trope or trait of contemporary New Zealand poetry.
These reservations aside, it is a pleasure to confirm that New Days for Old is a thoroughly entertaining text; a sort of live-wire autobiography in fragments, although each fragment is complete in itself. As the title suggests, one instant observation or encounter is replaced by another in rapid, vivid succession. Lively connections backwards and forwards emerge as the pages accumulate. Like Smither, and as fluently, Brown permits his deeper material to advance by stealth.
In the course of 80-odd unnumbered and unnamed paragraphs, none of them the length of a page and many much less, Brown’s preoccupation with the theme of days and the temporal occurs through the lives of personae, or through narrative voices, varying in age from infancy to maturity. It’s a busy, noisy world where meals are prepared, journeys are undertaken, rugby and other games are discussed, and the erotic intrudes into dreams and a cinema foyer. In one passage, school pupils with the surnames of English Romantic poets play up in class and are caught being beastly to a German contemporary. Understandable, then, that one participant reacts in the following way:
They were loquacious people. Even their ears could talk.
I saw a small boy crouched in a corner covering his, trying
to make them stop.
Through the middle sections there are many wonderful sentences: the Dickensian ‘Mrs Lombard gave a startled bleat and blundered out through a wormhole in the accounting into the abandoned garden’; ‘A man outside KFC claims he was once served Kentucky fried chaffinch’; ‘Susan, who knew what fanlights were, made a small plughole noise like our drain before it blocked’; ‘The small town was as quiet as its museum’; ‘Two girls sat on the sea wall in transparent raincapes like goldfish in plastic bags’. The poem ‘Read Proust for soft focus’ will do to represent fine sentences assembled en masse. Few poets since Ian Wedde’s ‘Pathway to the Sea’, which he quotes, can have had as much trouble with drainage as Brown has apparently endured.
On three occasions, ‘Baby’ poems are interspersed. These consist of film titles corrupted by the insertion of the word ‘baby’: ‘Edward Babyhands’ or ‘Babies of the Lost Ark’, for example. As such, they echo the absurdist treatment of the prose poem by early twentieth-century French or France-domiciled experimental writers like Max Jacob or Gertrude Stein—or, more recently, verbal jests by such writers as Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis. Sometimes, James just wants to have fun.
Functional prose, though, differs from poetry, whether in linear form or in paragraphs, by asking and answering questions; whereas poetry entices its readers to ask the questions and then find answers in the text or in themselves. Prose poetry, performative rather than transactional, enacts this characteristic, distinguishing it from the vignette or flash fiction. How much Brown takes risks and trusts his process is clear in the following one-liner:
Her hands were so cold.
Minimal but not obscure, this demonstrates subjective and objective responses happening simultaneously in language.
· · ·
If Brown’s trajectory seems horizontal and exploratory, because his work is persistently moving forward, Lynn Jenner’s emphasis in The Gum Trees of Kerikeri is vertical, staying in place and digging deeper into the matter of locality and its uses. Geographical setting is critical in this sequence of 56 prose poems; and the gum trees, exotic and fast-growing as opposed to slower-paced native species, are emblematic. Around them murmurs the troubled undercurrent of an egregiously colonial settlement:
The land I live on was a kauri forest for centuries …
A poet who doubles as an essayist/memoirist, Jenner assimilates a fair amount of non-fiction into the prose poetry genre without fracture or overload. Her words embody subtle meditations, avoiding stridency, which makes them in some ways more powerful. Telling expressions, such as ‘Promised Land’ and ‘land grabbing’, arise almost casually, as if in passing conversation. That the past she refers to is nearly entirely Pākehā is indicative, and Jenner addresses this conditioning directly. Her level of honesty is refreshing.
One central figure is the poet’s great-grandfather, a Jewish refugee from Poland who came to New Zealand in 1879, thus sparing himself and subsequent members of the family from the lethal horrors of European bigotry that culminated in World War II. This country was a safe place. But at what point does the unthinking presence of the descendants of such migrants make it ironically unsafe?
I wonder sometimes if I would know when it is time to leave, and
how many of his descendants ask themselves the same question.
With an academic background, well-read, and politically and culturally active, Jenner has a poetic voice that offers a stimulating accompaniment to the ideas she investigates, without providing easy conclusions. Her poems allude to Asian literature and philosophy, astronomy, yoga, feminism and a pantheon of ‘high’ intellectual or aesthetic influences extending to contemporaries such as Anne Carson and Rebecca Solnit. Jane Austen rates a mention, and other high-culture figures referenced include painters Andrea Mantegna and Colin McCahon. Endearingly, popular culture is neither neglected nor scorned. Reality TV, Yellowstone and gender politics in The Rookie provide insights. Henning Mankell’s detective, Kurt Wallander, is cited as in need of consolation unavailable in the fictional circumstances he inhabits.
The word ‘sometimes’ crops up significantly during Jenner’s contemplations. No opinion or belief can in modern circumstances be held unwaveringly, it seems, without further thought. Her take on our currently imperilled planet is that being well-meaning may not be enough and even decisive actions may be misdirected. Solutions are tentative, dependent on the fallibility of our human selves:
You can ask for notifications; sometimes you see lights, but you
cannot mount a grid search for happiness as you would for a tramper
lost in the bush.It sometimes crosses my mind that I have done nothing to deserve
these gifts, but mostly I just think how sweet the fruit tastes …
To a mind like Lynn Jenner’s—and this is healthy—reading and viewing are part of lived reality. Her populated imagination sifts incoming perceptions and experiences, creatively encompassing end times, dark knowledge and tenderness. On the strength of this outing in print, she is very good company.
TONY BEYER is a Taranaki-based writer. Recent poems by him have appeared online in US journals Hamilton Stone Review and Mudlark, and in the Australian e-journal Cordite.
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