Mary Macpherson
Petroglyphs by Craig Foltz (Compound Press, 2024), 80pp, $30; For When Words Fail Us: A small book of changes by Claire Beynon (The Cuba Press, 2024), 233pp, $30; anthology (n.) a collection of flowers by Gail Ingram (Pūkeko Publications, 2024), 113pp, $30
The question of whether we can ever define the meaning of anything sits at the heart of Petroglyphs, New Plymouth-based poet Craig Foltz’s new collection. Petroglyphs, as Google’s AI overview tells us, are carvings directly on a rock surface, made hundreds or thousands of years ago by ancient civilisations. The images might appear familiar, but the meanings are a mystery. Foltz, originally from the US, says in a 2024 interview with the Taranaki Daily News that specific 15,000-year-old petroglyphs in California formed a bibliography for his poems. ‘I’m trying to tell a story in a way that somewhat makes sense and somewhat doesn’t make sense, which is how I think petroglyphs work,’ he said. One could never be sure how to interpret the carvings.
This instability is foregrounded in the structure of the book. Divided into three sections, the first is titled INTACT and features page-long prose poems; the second, PARTIAL, has allusive one to three stanza works all called ‘Petroglyph’, while in the third, ERASED, words dance across the page, their connections almost entirely rubbed out. To reinforce the point, each section is accompanied by an intricate illustration by Robert Sly, parts of which disappear each time it’s used. Although it possibly wasn’t the intention, the diminished illustration also reminded me uncomfortably of parts of the brain succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease.
While the book’s design and structure are significant, the real excitement of this collection lies in being inside the poems, where, true to the poet’s promise, words flit around the edges of sense. The dense prose poems of INTACT are fuelled by absurdist lists and mini pronouncements, which allow Foltz to skip nimbly from one assertion to another to create elusive surreal worlds. At times there are playful searches for taxonomy but what we’re left with is the brush of a poem as it glides by.
Subjects can be familiar, such as the poem ‘We Only Remember The Good Times’:
You are haunted by the same three memories over & over again. The
first memory involves a group of girls you went to high school with.
These were the kind of girls who would not talk to the kinds of girls
who would to you. You couldn’t tell the girls apart from one another
if they unstitched the silky filament that held their limbs together …
But mostly the references are fast-moving, leaping between biology, scientific processes, geology and hybrid creatures. The settings take place underwater, on land, in past ages and the future. ‘Conversation Was Never My Thing’ begins:
The first epiphany went like this: Water ran down my arms and legs.
Bubbles escaped the side of my lips. Before embarking on this
subterranean journey, one must first weave simple patterns into their
skin. One describes the difference between rain & rainfall. Rainfall
& periodicals. Periodicals & footnotes. Another uses their limbs
to perforate the blossoms formed by a hoop of delicate wire or by
a simple mesh of fingers …
There’s also an offbeat humour that ripples throughout the work, as in this Petroglyph poem:
In which the sea bed is composed of sensuously frictive surfaces.
We gravitate towards pop-eyes, periwinkles & other glossy, shell-
wearing meanies. These are the tools of the trade for apocalypse
apologists. Wrecking balls. Sticky foam. Wire brushes.
These are innovative, exciting poems that cleverly enact the idea that interpretation is up for grabs or nonexistent. You may, or may not, be left with an impression of petroglyphs, but like any poetry that doesn’t give up a literal meaning, Petroglyphs rewards repeated readings.
I hesitated when thinking how to describe Claire Beynon’s For When Words Fail Us: A small book of changes. At first, prompted by the third-person point of view in the work, I wanted to call it a verse novella, but then it is founded on an 11-year relationship between the author and an anonymous man in the United States. So more of a creative verse memoir, based, Beynon says, on memory and imagination as well as an archive of written material.
The book begins with a certain amount of setting up, describing how Beynon meets the man at a photographic exhibition and spends an evening connecting with him and friends. At this point I wondered about the use of the triplets to tell the story, but the work soon settled to its purpose, which is to track the emotional and psychological heartbeats of an evolving long-distance relationship.
There’s beauty and sensitivity in the way Beynon defines the worlds of ‘she’ and ‘he’ and also their reactions to each other. During a week-long residency in Queen Charlotte Sound, she describes the appliances on the deck of her house:
… On the deck,
under cover in the far right-hand
corner, a gas barbeque and an old
chest freezer stand like an old comity
of nations, each as rusty and past
its use-by date as the other.
Every so often the freezer
shivers as if touched by a ghost …
The pair’s reactions to each other are traced delicately throughout the work, especially with Beynon’s skilful use of the strikethrough, allowing us to feel the pressure of hidden thoughts and competing perceptions, particularly her ongoing ambivalence towards his eagerness and moments of jealousy or transgression.
Early on:
He’s impatient to see her again—
Air New Zealand’s advertising
all those specials. When can I come?…
… She’s grateful to the oceans
And continents for defending defining
the distance between them.
The use of the third person helps to lift the narrative into a semi-fictional realm that marries well with the book’s meditative tone and thoughtful observations. It also allows Beynon to play with the characters’ names to heighten particular moods or underline tensions in the relationship. During a rare harmonious trip together, she and he become ‘a woman’ and ‘a man’, and the pages shift to a lighter and more impressionistic typeface. Elsewhere in the relationship ‘he’ is called ‘Satyr’, a reference to the voluptuous painting ‘Nymphs and Satyr’ by William-Adolphe Bouguereau he’s contracted to write about. In the work, Satyr appears to be drowning in nymphs, bewildered by which one to reach for. The name also carries an uneasy association with Greek satyrs known for their ribaldry and pursuit of women.
One of the foundational pleasures in the relationship, and the book, is the way art, books and poetry are currency in the couple’s world. As well as ‘Nymphs and Satyr’, The Book of Changes, Pablo Neruda, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, Joseph Decker’s luminous Grapes’ image, which provides the book’s cover, and Beynon’s own artwork, are integrated into the story either as daily references or something deeper. Theodore Roethke’s slow-paced villanelle ‘The Waking’, with its emphasis on the importance of learning by experience, is integral, providing stanza-by-stanza introductions to each section. The theme echoes Beynon’s use of the present tense to reveal the bittersweet lessons of the relationship as they happen.
The design of the publication by Paul Stewart of The Cuba Press and Claire Beynon deserves a shout-out. The chunky book that almost fits in one hand reinforces the intimate diary-like nature of the work. The sensuous cover, the reproduction of ‘Nymphs and Satyr’ hidden inside the back cover flap, and the subtle title glyphs that change with each speaker all support a luminous account of the ebb and flow of a long-term relationship.
If Craig Foltz works with nature to create unreal worlds, then Gail Ingram uses native flowers to extend her botanical reach across the social landscape of Aotearoa. The poems in anthology (n) a collection of flowers traverse colonialism, Crowded House, Wordsworth, Dostoevsky, the author’s family and personal life, and much else besides. This is 21st-century nature poetry with a strong social and ecological bent, written by a person who’s at home on a high-country tramp as well as observant of native plants in the suburbs and city.
Quite a few poems in the book speak with the voice of the plant, voices which are vigorous, opinionated and often skeptical of Homo sapiens. The poem for Tutāhuna, Vegetable Sheep, ‘A book of beasts for the twentieth century (according to a sheep)’ begins:
Google-eyed dummies:
When the carnivorous plants came to visit the Christchurch
Botanic Gardens, humanity walked through the hothouse in
conveyor-belt lines. Their eyes popped, their mouths moved
slowly, you could hear them thinking: When’s a plant not animal
not person? As usual they forgot the vegetable sheep, …
In ‘Lichen, a successful colonizer in hostile environments’, the tiny plant observes colonists building a town on a port and a path up the hill:
the one called John Williams brushed past, like the others, panting, unfit
for the climb, his breaches threadbare, the smell of cramped quarters,
brine and children’s vomit trickling from his crevices …
In the penultimate stanza the plant gets a close-up view of John William’s fatal collapse and puce face—‘his pale/fingers scrabbling for the rock I was colonizing …’ High above the town, the lichen continues to observe the colonisers’ ships, the dead man’s wife and children and other women taking the washing in ‘… at/last, starched stiff and clean in the afternoon sun’.
The engine room of this collection is the dizzying inventiveness of the poems throughout the book, in approach, voice and form. Part of the interest, almost like a game, is to see how Ingram will match a plant or flower with poem and approach.
In a short space one can go from a short tender poem like ‘Daughter’, for the Southern Rata, which combines her daughter’s birth with a Rata’s flowering, to ‘Donatia (novae-zelandie)’, a list-like autobiographical work where Ingram considers her relationship with Wordsworth, to ‘Notes from the Aboveground—after Dostoevsky’, riffing on the Russian author’s Notes from the Underground, to the energy of ‘The Muehlenbeckia rap’:
Yo, I over here, I
the creeper, the twisty thing,
I send my tendrils out,
round and round, and over, bro
I creep on them rocks,
I love them fences
Some of the memorable poems are personal ones where Ingram, who calls herself Flora, brings in scenes from her activities, or writes about friends, her daughter or husband. In ‘Husband’s carryall—for the Hoahoa’, Ingram cleverly evokes her husband’s role in tramping as the major carrier of stuff along with his qualities ‘he carries responsibility a moral compass a sense of who he is/ he carries ideas like there should be an environmental high court’… She also humorously evokes the tramping relationship between the couple—‘he carries ideas like we’ll just stop up here which means we’ll keep/going/another/ten minutes up/an impossibly steep slope …’
This is a book that wants to be really, really helpful to the reader. Not only has Ingram curated a fantastic collection of native flowers, many of which I hadn’t heard of, but each page has an illustrated header with the common, botanical, and often Māori name of the plant. As well there’s a prominent colour photograph of the plant’s flowers, and if an explanation is needed to clarify something in the poem, or a plant reference, there are boxed field notes at the bottom of the page. No discreetly placed sources and references in Notes at the back. The only issue with this user-friendly approach is that can lead to pages that are overloaded with design elements. In order to concentrate on the poems, which are in fine type, I found myself having to cover up the photographs to cut down on the visual distraction.
That aside, this is a lively, accessible collection of poetry that is also an imaginative resource for anyone wanting to know more about native plants with their tiny jewel-like flowers.
MARY MACPHERSON is a poet, photographer, photobook maker and art writer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Her poems have been published in Landfall, The Spinoff and Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems. Her first poetry collection, Social Media, was published by The Cuba Press in 2019.
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