Genevieve Scanlan
Meantime by Majella Cullinane (Otago University Press, 2024), 82pp, $30; Tidelines by Kiri Piahana-Wong (Anahera Press, 2024), 40pp, $25; Chew the Bright Hysteria by Rhondda Greig (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2024), 76pp, $35
Meantime is the third collection of poetry from Majella Cullinane. Given its grief-laden subject matter and tone, describing it as a triumph feels slightly dissonant—and yet a triumph it is. It will make readers acutely aware of the passage of mortal time, but it should not be hurried through. This is a work that deserves to be read slowly and reflectively.
Originally from Ireland, Cullinane has lived in Aotearoa New Zealand since 2008. In the poem ‘Long-distance’ she describes herself as ‘Daughter of the long-distance phone call’, while in ‘Packing your bags’ she reflects that she ‘was always the one leaving, / stretching the muscle fibres’ of familial bonds across distance. Then came 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic prevented Cullinane from returning to Ireland just as her mother reached the end of her life. Even phone conversations were beyond possibility, given that what was taking her mother was ‘the long goodbye’ of dementia.
Meantime centres on being bound by hard limits of time and space, and yet these poems are wide-reaching. They are filled with flowers and changing seasons, angels and animals, ghosts and technology. They take epigraphs from Yeats, Whitman, Dante, Anne Sexton. They are deeply personal and universal. ‘Death,’ Cullinane reminds us, ‘is a shared language’.
Distance and place are central to Meantime, and the sense of each place is beautifully wrought. Cullinane waits, stranded in Ōtepoti Dunedin, where in her garden the pīwakawaka sing and ‘soon Matariki and her daughters will wake and pulse in the sky’. She finds resonance in the image of ‘daughters separated from their mother / by hundreds of light years’. She sees her mother reflected back all around her: ‘In the hairdressers in South Ōtepoti / you’re the old woman with an overgrown bouffant perm’. When a person dies, they can be found ‘everywhere and nowhere’.
Though Cullinane is now settled in Aotearoa with her own young family, in this time of grief it is Ireland that calls to her. ‘It doesn’t matter how far away I am,’ she writes, ‘I am nothing to this place. / It cannot hold me. / … The yellow spark of broom I passed / in the alleyway will not remember me.’ But Ireland will remember her, and she remembers it, in evocative and characteristic detail. Her mother making soda bread; the magpie rhyme that begins ‘one for sorrow’; a light-up LED Virgin Mary figure. ‘Later, reading an email from Inis Mór, / I imagine the Atlantic, / see hefted waves against cliffs, / grief momentarily suspended.’
One element of Cullinane’s Irish background is her mother’s Catholic faith, which was a point of contention between them. Her mother’s firm belief in ‘some halcyon otherworld, / the kind of place that would bore me to tears’, is not something Cullinane, one of ‘the doubting Thomases’, can honestly share. There is great poignancy in the poems that touch upon this subject.
Cullinane does not shy away from the complexities of familial relationships, yet throughout this collection, love underpins and overwhelms every other feeling. The beautiful poem ‘Make no sound’ recalls a childhood memory of having transgressed and hiding from her mother’s anger in prickly gooseberry bushes. From her painful vantage point in the present, the poet wishes herself—and her mother—back to that time:
Could I breathe deep enough for two, smell the rain
on the air, it’d take us back for an instant, to me hiding
in those gooseberries; I would emerge gladly,
accept any punishment or rebuke …
We’ll rest here, make no sound
as the blackbird sings to us in the gooseberry bushes.
Tidelines is the latest collection from Kiri Piahana-Wong (Ngāti Ranginui, Chinese, English). The poet’s own experiences—of grief, mental unwellness and suicidality—are paralleled with those of Hinerangi, ‘an early tupuna of Te Kawerau ā Maki (tangata whenua of the area in Auckland now known as Waitakere, traditionally known as Hikurangi.)’ When her beloved husband was lost at sea, Hinerangi sat on the headland above and refused to leave, eventually dying there. The headland is named for her—Te Ahua o Hinerangi.
These poems reflect on the time Piahana-Wong was living in Laingholm, not far from where Hinerangi lived and grieved. The poet captures the landscape in vivid, embodied detail. ‘Tāwhirimātea has taken the house today. White-capped waves / scud into the bay … I have lived here for a / year and the tide has seeped / into my body. I wake / with the weather.’ Indeed, the intensity of the place sometimes proved overwhelming. Piahana-Wong came to feel that ‘all if it / was too much drama, and far too much poetry, like / living in a landscape of ancient Atua come to life again’.
Several poems take on the perspective of Hinerangi herself. (Piahana-Wong does not whakapapa to Te Kawerau ā Maki, but consulted them and writes with their blessing.) In the depths of her grief, Hinerangi longs for dissolution, disintegration of the self: ‘to merge my voice / with the world-song, become / a single drop in the ocean, / be everywhere and nowhere’.
Piahana-Wong is familiar with feeling this way. In one powerfully understated line, she coolly observes, ‘I keep / reading that human beings have an innate will / to survive, but in some of us it is not well-developed’. Lorazepam offers temporary relief, but too often proves inadequate. More than once she wakes surrounded by pills, first in her car and then in a hospital—where a nurse calls her a ‘silly girl’.
The poem ‘The day I died’ is the centre of this collection, both structurally and thematically. It recounts the day Piahana-Wong followed in Hinerangi’s footsteps to the edge of that cliff:
I felt the unremitting pull
of Hinerangi calling
me, urging me to join her,
jump from the cliff, drown
myself in her distress …
it was my own tupuna who answered …
My tupuna tane, they
came: my great-grandfather,
paramount chief Te Hare
Piahana, filled with mana
stern and unyielding; …
And yes, the women: my
unnamed, unknown
ancestress, my protector,
wrapped in a korowai …
And with their coming, a mighty
gust of wind blew me back
from the edge of the cliff
and away
Crucially, this experience is framed as deeply personal and individual. While she herself was ‘blown back’ from the edge, Piahana-Wong is not about to question the crushing weight of anyone else’s despair, or call anyone a ‘silly girl’ the way she herself was dismissed. A poem coming later in the collection asks, ‘If you gave a hundred / people a pill that would kill them painlessly and / said that they could choose to use it, or not, how / many would be dead by the next morning?’ There is a deep and moving compassion in this frankly posed question—especially coming as it does after the poet’s own turning back from the edge.
The last word in this collection is given to Hinerangi. In a direct address to the reader, this ancestor figure asserts her own agency: ‘I want you to understand, I / chose my destiny. When I sat / on the headland and did not / move, there was power in it. / And certainty. Not just my / grief, I knew.’ Hinerangi insists upon the individual nature of her case, too: ‘I never intended / that my decision sway / others despairing of life.’ In this way, Tidelines holds multiple truths in parallel. Each person’s experience of suffering is deeply individual, not precisely comparable to anyone else’s—and still, we may find resonance and sometimes consolation in other people’s stories.
Chew the Bright Hysteria is a showcase for Rhondda Greig’s skill both as a poet and an artist. The paintings that appear throughout this book are vivid and striking, whether making use of bold colours or of monochrome. Greig writes her poetry with a similar kind of expressionistic flair. Her poetical palette is loaded with deliciously rich vocabulary—this reader lingered with delight over words like ‘propinquity’, ‘nimiety’, ‘epithalamium’, ‘filamentous’.
These are very much the poems of an artist. Early in the collection, one poem (‘Raphael’) asks, ‘Raphael did not live at Matarawa / but given he could have / would he rotate his brush inside the throat / of a pukeko alone in the frost / gauge the timbre of the nocturnal call / then paint it vermillion?’ In ‘The Sistine Chapel’ Greig is struck by the stark violence of religious history, before being swayed by ‘Spiritus sanctus with sable strokes / saffron / ochre / crimson / are limed with marble dust / and blue / You can be transfigured / by blue’.
Speaking of transfiguration, Greig does a fair bit of that herself. She can turn even the morbid remains of a spider-devoured moth into something worthy of attention: ‘one iridescent eye / detached from the night / … a scintilla of blue / in all the disappear’. This abstraction and playfulness with language feels characteristic of Greig’s style.
At times, that abstraction can feel slightly alienating. ‘Eating chocolate’ is a poem nominally about indulgence, but viewed with detachment and reduced to its component parts. ‘Flirt with the slip / of fat over enamel / … lactose flavours / and emulsifiers 322 and 476’. It felt, to this reviewer, a little too much like that dismembered moth, and oddly much less appealing. Other examples are far more enjoyable. ‘Blizzard in Aberdeen’ offers absurdist instructions in case of a weather event. In so much of her work, Greig looks beyond the merely literal to what is beautiful, playful, meaningful, or all of the above.
Greig has travelled widely and lived in several different countries. In ‘Living in a landscape’, she emphasises the breadth of her canvas—from the Wairarapa she ‘can see as far as Aberdeen and Rome / there are no walls, no doors here’. With this international focus comes an awareness of international concerns, violence and injustice. Several poems address the US invasion of Iraq. ‘After Robben Island’ reminisces on a time of hope and inspiration:
In 1990 Mandela
rode his bicycle to Matarawa
he pedalled the paddocks
round and round with
God sitting on the handlebars.
The back cover blurb describes Chew the Bright Hysteria as stemming from Greig’s ‘desire to paint and reflect her world’. Her world and her interests are vast in scope—this is reflected both in her chosen subject matter and her style. Greig plays with modern forms, but also writes much more traditional poems—a lament for death, and an epithalamium (a poem in celebration of a marriage). From birth to death, from Matarawa to Rome, Greig finds nothing unworthy of attention. In her ‘Lament for Joanna Margaret Paul, from Aberdeen’, she finds that deep bonds can transcend time, geographic space, and death—a concept that is threaded through all three collections reviewed here. ‘I listen to the surf madrigals / of the North Sea / eyes whipped with salt / You are here / and there.’
GENEVIEVE SCANLAN lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. She has reviewed poetry for Landfall, HAMSTER magazine and The Rochford Street Review, and has had her own work published in a range of journals.
Leave a Reply