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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Cross-currents: Seven Recent Poetry Collections

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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.

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.

Summer’s Last Cicada

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David Herkt
Campana To Montale: Versions From the Italian, by Kendrick Smithyman, edited by Jack Ross and Marco Sonzogni (Edizione Joker – Transference series, 2010) 244 pp., $35.00.

Translation is a loaded literary subject. The transmutation of a poem, from one language to another, is a fraught act, and the status of a translated poem seems, if possible, even more problematic. It is also clear from the outset that Kendrick Smithyman’s translations from Italian, by a New Zealand poet who did not speak Italian, are a very special case. Campana To Montale: Versions From the Italian contains 211 poems by fourteen Italian modernist poets, ranging from the troubled isolate Dino Campana to Nobel laureate Salvatore Quasimodo, rendered into English by Smithyman. These ‘versions’, as he preferred to call them, were mainly the products of his late career, and many were completed after his retirement from the University of Auckland in 1987.
            The initial impulse seems to have been Smithyman’s dissatisfaction with some literal translations by Mary and Walter de Rachewiltz in a 1968 dual Italian/English issue of Poetry Australia (22/23), which he read in the early 1980s. However, his first ‘I could do better’ response to the clumsiness he perceived went far beyond a case of simple dismissal. It would play a role in more than a decade of his life.

            No other New Zealand poet has had such a substantial involvement with European poetry or with poets writing in another language. While the first step might have been the product of a momentary reaction, it is evident that the following engagement was anything but haphazard. As observed by Jack Ross in his introduction to Campana to Montale, the project became a ‘nightmare of industry’. For each of the chosen poems, Smithyman typed out the Italian text with a literal translation underneath and dictionary definitions down the side. This first page, in turn, was succeeded by a second with an initial English version, which was furthered worked to hone meaning, and produce line-breaks and scansion.
            Smithyman ended up translating nearly half of Salvadore Quasimondo’s complete output — 132 out of 195 poems — as well as large chunks of Eugenio Montale and Sandro Penna. They were accompanied by smaller selections from the works of other poets which, in sum, constitute a complete overview of the modernist poetic movement in Italy.
            Campana To Montale is a substantial and noteworthy addition to the corpus of Italian poetry in English. It is focused, yet comprehensive within those bounds. It gives a clear insight into more than half a century of writing. It is not the work of a dilettante. But Smithyman’s texts also produce far more questions than have been answered, even in the excellent essays by Ross and Marco Sonzogni that introduce and accompany the Edizione Joker edition. 
            Was such a labour really the product of a casually caused reaction? Was Smithyman’s involvement with Italian modernist poetry and poetics merely a matter of chance? Was it sustained purely by a hunt-and-peck exercise in dictionary translation much like doing a cryptic crossword in two languages? No matter how beguiling these questions might be, currently we have no real answers beyond the body of work. And such questions also avoid an obvious observation: these poems are some of Smithyman’s finest work.
            Evaluation of a poet’s oeuvre is not something that comes immediately. Things need time to settle. In Smithyman’s case this is further compounded by sheer volume. His self-selected Collected Poems (now easily accessible in toto, via: http://www.smithymanonline.auckland.ac.nz/) number some 1500 poems, even with the exclusion of ‘several hundreds’, some previously published.
            The place of the translations of Campana To Montale in this extensive output would initially appear minor — but for their outstanding quality. They have now been published in two countries: from The Writer’s Group in Auckland, New Zealand in 2004 and, in 2011, from Edizione Joker in Novi Ligure, Italy. They cannot be easily shuttled to the secondary place we so frequently reserve for a poet’s translations.
            In contradistinction to Smithyman’s vastly referential middle and late works, these translations are rich with deceptively simple wonders, stripped down to the bare bones, often stark, but always vivid.  There is, to take the most obvious example, ‘The Eel’:

            The eel, siren
            of the chill seas, quits the Baltic
            making for our seas,
            our estuaries, our rivers,
            flogging through the deeps, below the unfriendly flood
            from branch to branch and then
            from creek to stream, now waterways spreading like hairs,
            always pushing on further, into the very heart
            of the rock, slimed fine and easing
            through muddy creases . . .
                                                              (Eugene Montale: ‘The Eel’/’L’anguilla’)

            It is one of any number of eye-blinkingly good versions in Campana to Montale:

            Green on an unmoving sea, 
            islands where I used to live.

            Dried weeds, marine fossils,
            the beach where in their mating season sped
            horses of volcanoes and the moon . . .
                                                         (Salvadore Quasimondo: ‘Moon Horses and Volcanos’/   
            ‘Cavalli di luna e di vulcani’)

These translations encompass a wide range of poets and their responses to a world. There are the melancholy gay observations of Sandro Penna:

            Shadow of a light-footed cloud
            led me to a boy
            who came up from the fast-running river
            to stretch out naked on the grass . . .
                                                      (Sandro Penna, Untitled, L’ombra di una nuvola… , p. 52)

And Guiseppe Ungaretti’s almost-imagist, broken syntaxed condensations:

            A whole night long
            cast down beside,
            to
                 a mate butchered
            there
                             with his insulted mouth
            turned to the full moon
                             with the congestion
            of his hands
            making their way
            into my silence,
                          I have written
            letters full of love.
                                                 (Guiseppe Ungaretti: ‘The Vigil of Ungaretti’/‘Veglia’)

             Smithyman’s Italy is a locale of sharp images, taut phrases, and hard-edged summer light. At times, these translations have an almost cinematic quality. Shores are moon-crazed. Horizons withdraw. Anguish bursts into flame. In tone, they are often compressed and dramatic action-epics. Strangely, too, these poems are often not so much translated into English as they are transferred into a very New Zealand vernacular.
            They are filled with words and locutions like: ‘shelter-belt’, ‘the wind bares the kids’ submissive heads’, ‘our gullies’, ‘a mate butchered’, ‘the sun now wallops them’ – and the redolent ‘We shall have to put away the beach gear’. The recognitions by a New Zealand reader are unending. At times, it is almost as if we are exploring a great body of previously undiscovered New Zealand verse. They show us ourselves in a strange but very beguiling mirror. They make us ache for more translations by other New Zealand poets, granting us something most other cultures have experienced in full, a poetry enriched by exterior views painstakingly framed in a local perspective.
            Again, the position of Campana To Montale in Smithyman’s poetic career comes to the foreground. They are anomalous in his works and they force us to examine his own decisions in his own poetry, multifaceted as it was. It is possible to see them as a bright lance into ‘what could have been’, if Smithyman had not been dominated by the consequences of the nationalist project that had governed a century of New Zealand poets and poems. Their condensation, set against the sprawl of Smithyman’s own productions, the intensity of their vision, the multiple viewpoints, their tautness, and the lick and the turn of their relished language, all take these poems a long way from the discursive baseline of a late modern and early postmodern antipodean tradition.
            They inevitably produce a readerly desire that Smithyman had proceeded their way, rather than to the dead-ended, sometimes bloated, frequently derivative, and ultimately provincial gaze that is so evident in the exactly contemporaneous Atua Wera and Imperial Vistas Family Fictions, immense enterprises though they are. It is even possible to suggest, paradoxically, that the traditionally regarded bonds of translation here represent freedom for Smithyman: freedom from a nation at the back end of nowhere, freedom from an insular subject and inwardly turned received poetics, and freedom, ultimately, from himself.
But finally, it is their quality and power that should be our focus. In a century of poet’s translations, from Pound to Lowell to Heaney, Smithyman more than holds his space. His recreation of the poetry of another nation is alluring. His ‘nightmare of industry’ is successful. The works remain vividly in mind. The relocation of the poems by the translator is exactly achieved.
            It is to our benefit that these versions exist, but it is also our loss that Smithyman could not finally transfer this marvellously attained achievement to benefit his own self-authored works. This world of ‘could-have-been’ – compact, compressed, vibrant, and profound – must stand as one of the great lessons of late twentieth-century New Zealand poetry.


DAVID HERKT is a television director and researcher. A collection of his poetry, The Body of Man, was published by Hazard Press.

Siege Symphony

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Graeme Lay
The Conductor, by Sarah Quigley (Vintage, 2011), 303 pp., $39.99.

Sarah Quigley’s fourth novel opens with a small but ominous harbinger. In the spring of 1941, the renowned Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich is informed by his friend, music teacher Ivan Sollertinsky, that two German diplomats have cancelled suit orders with Leningrad’s most reputable tailor. The signal is significant – as the German diplomats are leaving the city and returning to Berlin, it seems that the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 is about to collapse. After it does, in mid-summer 1941, the Germans invade the Soviet Union and lay siege to Leningrad, bringing ghastly privations to the city’s civilian population.
       Within this hideous environment Shostakovich (1906-1975) composes his Seventh Symphony, a personal magnum opus which will be broadcast by the Soviet authorities in order to sustain the morale of the population. Shostakovich has for some time had an uneasy relationship with Stalin’s regime, but is tolerated because of his popularity with the people. As Sollertinsky remarks to Shostakovich, after the composer has called him a ‘masterful dissembler’: ‘We both know that dissemblers live longer than dissidents’.

           Karl Eliasberg, the unmarried conductor of the below-par Leningrad Radio Orchestra, lives in an apartment with his nagging, petulant mother. He worships Shostakovich, who is everything he is not. Eliasberg is an insecure loner whose own musicians barely tolerate him. Neurotic and a stammerer, he seems incapable of conducting even a Leningrad tramcar.  Closer to Shostakovich is violinist Nikolai Nikolayev, a widower and father of a beloved nine-year-old, Sonya, a promising cellist. Another precious possession of the Nikolayev family is Sonya’s cello, a Storioni, which the girl plays during her birthday celebrations, drawing sincere praise from Shostakovich.
       The siege intensifies. Leningrad is garrotted by the German Army and blitzed mercilessly by the Luftwaffe. Although most of the city’s leading musicians are evacuated to the Far East of the USSR, Shostakovich stays, digging ditches and fire-watching from the rooftops by day, then working through the night on his symphony. Barely tolerated by Nina, his long-suffering wife, he subsists on bread, vodka and cigarettes.
          Dread sets in among Leningrad’s citizens, who know that the bitter winter is looming. The city’s children, including Sonya, are evacuated by train to the countryside. This causes anguish for Nikolai, whose grief becomes unbearable when he hears that the train his young daughter was on has been bombed and derailed by the Germans.
     Under the most constrained of circumstances, Shostakovich labours on with his composition, shutting himself away in his room and cutting himself off from the demands of his family. Close to despair, the composer wonders, ‘When would life stop getting in the way of music?’ At the same time, poor Eliasberg tries to cope with his rebellious orchestra as well as the querulous demands of his mother.
       While the siege, the bitter winter and starvation beset Leningrad’s inhabitants, the novel’s central characters – Shostakovich, Eliasberg and Nikolayev – confront their various demons. Shostakovich wonders if he can possibly finish his symphony. Even sheet paper on which to write his score is almost unobtainable. Nikolayev grieves for his lost daughter, painfully regretful that he ever sent her away. His sister, Tanya, threatens to barter Sonya’s priceless cello for food. Eliasberg struggles to cope with his disintegrating orchestra, whose oboeist, Alexander, is openly contemptuous of him.
        The privations of the people of Leningrad have become so extreme that even the corpses of the dead are stripped for food. The horrors of the siege, the wrecking of innocent bodies and the desperation of people driven to live like foraging animals is vividly evoked. Eliasberg is close to despair: ‘In the long winter weeks that followed, he crawled through the days half-blinded by grief and rage. The frozen city splintered under the German shells, and bodies piled up at the sides of Nevsky Prospect. Stick-thin women stumbled to the Neva and drew water through holes drilled in the ice. Because Elias’s vision was failing, he tried to make sense of the disintegrating world by listening to it. What sounds did he hear? The grating of sled-runners loaded with corpses. Huge explosions as mass burial pits were created with dynamite. The howls of stray dogs and cats, slaughtered by Leningraders desperate for meat’.
       When Eliasberg is able to provide a grateful Shostakovich with score paper, the conductor comes closer to his hero. The Soviet authorities then arrange for Shostakovich and his family to be evacuated, taking them far from the conflict so that Dimitri can finish his composition. Completed from afar, the score is flown over the German lines and back into Leningrad. Now it is over to Eliasberg and his pitiful orchestra to rehearse, and eventually perform Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony.
            Unexpectedly but heroically, Eliasberg rises to this extreme challenge. Freed from the hungry clutches of his mother, supported by a lovely, wounded ballerina, Nina Bronnikova, he overcomes his self-pity, learns to love and be loved, and becomes resolute in his determination to do justice to the composer he so admires. Shostakovich now being off-stage, Eliasberg moves to the forefront of the narrative and justifies his role in capturing the novel’s title.
          With its assured characterisation and trenchant dialogue, and informed by the author’s musical background (Quigley has played cello herself), The Conductor’s narrative begins slowly but gathers movement, momentum and intensity. The sometimes bitchy world of the professional musician provides a chorus to the story. Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky come in for some scathing comments, and even the master, Shostakovich himself, is accused by Eliasberg at one stage of ‘referencing other works’, in the Russian’s case, Ravel. The novel then builds to a tantalising crescendo in which the final movement – the broadcast of the symphony – is delectably anticipated. Eliasberg is on the podium.
        ‘When he cranes slightly forward, he can see a row of microphones pointed like guns towards the stage, ready to catch the Leningrad Symphony and broadcast it to the world. He takes a deep breath and steps into the blaze of electric light, far brighter than any sun. Sweat leaps on his back, the orchestra rises to its feet, and the audience also stands, a dark gleaming mass of military badges and medals, and pearls.’ Art is about to triumph over war, death and destruction.
          There are a few jarring notes in The Conductor. Characters bite their lips, tongues, and roll their eyes, rather too frequently, while the use of the contemporary words ‘recycled’ and ‘inappropriate’ are out of register for scenes occurring in 1942. But these are relatively minor linguistic quibbles.
             Originally from Christchurch, the recipient of a Buddle Findlay Sargeson fellowship in 1998 and the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers Residency in 2000, Quigley has lived in Berlin for the past eleven years. This European experience has been put to good use. The Conductor is by any standards a remarkable novel. Works of fiction depicting classical music and musicians are notoriously difficult to transfer to the pages of a novel, yet by credibly transforming Eliasberg from underdog to hero, Quigley succeeds in validating the conductor’s veneration of Shostakovich and at the same time provides the novel with a hearteningly upbeat conclusion. And to fill any imaginative musical vacuums from which the reader may suffer, the novel comes with a CD of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony.  Ambitious in its conception and stunningly executed, The Conductor is a work of truly international stature. 


GRAEME LAY is an Auckland-based reviewer, writer and editor. His recent books include the non-fiction work In Search of Paradise: Artists and Writers in the Colonial South Pacific and the novel Alice & Luigi.

Concept albums: Three recent poetry collections

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Nicholas Reid
Cassino – 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.

From People’s Rag to Scandal Sheet

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Adam Gifford
Truth: The Rise and Fall of the People’s Paper, by Redmer Yska (Craig Potton Publishing, 2010), 200 pp., $50.00.

Every Thursday the presses would start at Garrett Street a stone’s throw from Wellington’s Cuba Mall, first hesitatingly, then faster, until a torrent of inky tabloids would roll down the rickety conveyer belt. During the frequent breaks when the roll of newsprint tore or a cog jammed, a crew of casuals would play gin or stare disinterestedly at the headlines screaming smut and scandal in 124-point type. Redmer Yska walked into Garrett St in 1977 as a proofreader, until punk rock – a shock/horror/probe-style story about the Suburban Reptiles’ abortive gig at Victoria University – won him a reporting job.

              Redmer Yska and I both worked at the NZ Truth building in Garrett Street, central Wellington, in 1977. While I was one of the casuals, hired to unload Truth from the presses each Thursday, grabbing the streams of inky tabloids as they rolled off the rickety conveyor belts, he was employed up in the proofreading room, checking copy and learning first-hand how to sniff out scoop and scandal. It gave him an educated appreciation of yellow journalism, and a respect for sources and verification – it’s a comfort to have all the paperwork done when the writs come flying. It also gave him an ear for the sort of story New Zealanders want to read, but that the ‘respectable’ media were too sniffy to run, and an eye for the larger-than-life characters whose written-up exploits could brighten (or darken) the country’s provincial grey.

            These days, though, when metropolitan broadsheets daily fill their front pages with murder and marital discord, solicit gossip, and frequently feature the latest semi-clad celeb, there is little call for a paper which filled its pages with the doings from the divorce courts. Even when Yska was pounding the capital’s pavements earning his odium money (the 10 per cent margin over award rates which Truth journos enjoyed), the paper’s glory days were behind it. Working there, Yska quickly became aware of the paper’s history as ‘the people’s paper’, which seemed at odds with its descent into titillation and tattle-tale combined with union bashing and consumer advocacy.
            In trying to find out why, he has uncovered a narrative of change and evolution out of which multiple versions of Truth emerge. The weekly was an Australian import, the creation of John Norton, whose Sydney Truth mixed sport, sex, crime, divorce and general muckraking into a sulphurous, irreverent brew that appealed to its working-class readers, eager for escapism and the sensational. The 1.5-metre tycoon (referred to by the Australian Bulletin as ‘Freak, big man, small man, philanthropist, scoundrel’) crossed the Tasman in 1904 to lecture on workers’ rights, the threat of Asian migration, and the even greater threat of ‘prating parsons’, ‘putrid politicians’ and other wowsers who would deny a working man his simple pleasures.
            He was a bona fide republican hero, having conducted his own defence to beat a sedition charge for calling Queen Victoria ‘flabby, fat and flatulent’, and her son the Prince of Wales a ‘turf-swindling, card-sharping, wife-debauching rascal’. That kind of alliterative language flowered in the New Zealand edition when the presses started rolling in 1905. Most of its reporters and subs came over from the Sydney Truth, but its legal counsel was Wellington solicitor Alexander Dunn, the start of a seven-decade association between the Dunn family and the paper.
            Yska was unable to unearth any copies from Truth’s first year – libraries may not have wanted to file papers ‘that soiled the breakfast cloth’, but from stories reprinted in the Australian editions he detected a crusading spark, with social wrongs like sweatshops and corrupt prison guards exposed. In those early years, Truth did indeed try to become the ‘people’s paper’, poaching Socialist Party branch president Robert Hogg from rival weekly The Worker – and eventually making him editor – siding with striking Waihi mine workers, and attacking the Massey government’s brutal suppression of the Great Strike of 1913.
            It made a stand against militarism at the start of World War I, which morphed into support and advocacy for the rights of ordinary soldiers and their families. One of the clippings reproduced in this generously illustrated book is the letter Archibald Baxter, father of poet James K. Baxter, sent to his family about the punishments he had endured at the front for his conscientious objection.
            In the 1920s, Truth moved towards the centre, with more sports, consumer advocacy and pages for women (these latter produced briefly by Iris Wilkinson, also known as novelist Robin Hyde, whose unpublished autobiography Yska mines for Truth lore).While the paper didn’t back the emerging Labour Party, once it won power in 1935 Truth reached out, first by serialising John A. Lee’s The Hunted (after its favourable review had alerted many New Zealanders to the existence of his earlier Children of the Poor), and then by offering Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage a regular platform.
            Yska makes the case for Truth’s coverage being responsible for laying the foundations for the posthumous beatification of Savage. In 1950 the Norton family sold Truth to a group which included its chairman, lawyer J.H. (James Hamilton) Dunn, as well as businessman Cliff Plimmer – who became a senior figure in the National Party. Dunn took increasing charge of both newsroom and boardroom, creating a paradoxical mix of fierce anti-Communism, opposition to state control and the championing of the downtrodden.
            It’s here that Yska’s research becomes truly illuminating, uncovering a paper that on one hand was willing to take on abuses of police power and expose the true horror of capital punishment, yet on the other was used by the security services and right-wing politicians to undermine and attack perceived enemies. The hectoring and reactionary tone of the paper in subsequent decades, especially under editor Russell Gault, won the paper more enemies than friends. (LET’S HIT RATBAG STUDENTS HARD blared the headline in May 1970.)
            By the end, there were few tears as the paper slid towards becoming, as one of its later editors described it to me, ‘the trade paper for the sex industry’. Yska has mined Truth’s archives for his previous social histories, but now he has made the paper itself the story. And a fascinating read it is too.

ADAM GIFFORD also worked at Garrett Street in 1977, taking Truth off the presses, before finding his own circuitous route into journalism. He is an Auckland-based freelance journalist and writer who contributes regularly to the New Zealand Herald‘s arts pages.