Vaughan Rapatahana
Neither by Liam Jacobson (Dead Bird Books, 2023), 50pp, $30; Birdspeak by Arihia Latham (Anahera Press, 2023), 108pp, $25; Hopurangi/Songcatcher by Robert Sullivan (Auckland University Press, 2024), 144pp, $29.99
Three recent collections by three kaituhi Māori. Two are debut collections, while the third is by a seasoned veteran who has authored nine collections. Other than this shared indigeneity, are there similarities between the three beyond their one-word titles? Yes. Their books are concerned with honesty and directness of utterance, although the expressions of this vary from the obscure to the obvious.
Liam Jacobson (Kāi Tahu) in Neither presents 29 poems, and this collection by the youngest of the trio is also the slimmest of the three volumes. We encounter here a poet who is still finding their way, metaphorically or otherwise, around the central streets of Tāmaki Makaurau in a confused or inebriated state, with assorted poems offering variations on the line: ‘where the fuck are we’ (from ‘Till the Band Stops Playing’). Relatedly, there is often an overload of words, resulting in cryptic titles and clotted lines, which caused this reader to ask: what exactly is the poet trying to tell us? Consider, for example, the very first poem, ‘Brighten The Throat Of The Stilted Organ’, which seems to invite you to make up your own meaning. And it should be noted that all poem titles in Neither are placed in capital letters throughout, though the reason for this is neither explained nor justified. And, as further evidence that Jacobson frequently indulges in quirky Liam-speak and non-regular syntax, consider this:
you’re glowing violet while the clouds wilt at the ankles of a public dream
mine shiver held in a psalm in the dark driven from my skull
(from ‘Old Friend Under Your Breath I’m Warm’).
Frequently, an entire poem spouts a similar stoned gobbledegook; yet on occasion Jacobson does come up with some beaut images, such as:
the sidewalks stained with secrets
chew our feet behind us, the city lights still blind us
(from ‘Where’s The Day Gone?’)
And how about this showstopping zinger from ‘Tī Ngā Taringa’ (a poem title that is one of a smattering of te reo Māori inclusions): ‘a small fortune of hips swimming in baggy denim’? So although Jacobson’s wordiness often feels a bit slapdash, a bit of a pile-on, it can lead to some serendipitous and startling imagery, as in the oddly-titled ‘My Whale was a Messy Eater’, which includes the crackerjack and visceral line: ‘the noises of my belly are eating their way out of my skin’, which stopped me in my tracks.
In summary, Jacobson is at their best when they keep everything simple and the imagery in sharp focus. The poem ‘Angel Of Glass’, with its self-clarifying title, wows us from its first stanza:
years from now you’ll see her, still
with the posture of the sea itself
in a corner of your drink …
This poet writes as if language is an intoxicant in itself, and I look forward to sighting their next body of work, although actually, I reckon it would best be parlayed via an emphatic oral presentation. Tēnā koe a Liam.
Arihia Latham’s (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha) assemblage of mahi, entitled Birdspeak, is presented in three sections, with 59 poems overall. This poet is candid, powerful, and very ‘real’. I was impressed by this collection because Latham never wavers in their frank appraisal of their relationships, their tamariki, their tīpuna, their whakapapa, their own self-examination or self-consideration—which is always interlinked with ngā pūrakau me te kupu tuku iho Māori, sometimes holistically within the same poem. Latham shows no fear poeticising about experiences of domestic disturbance and violence:
I think of the man that swore he loved me
when he punched me in rage
(from ‘Stokes Valley filla five dollar’)
Likewise, she is direct when writing about the ravages and legacies of colonisation: ‘It was the colonisers that brought the muskets’ (from ‘Te Whē’). And she passionately eulogises Māori men of mana, such as Moana Jackson:
Your voice changes history
like moss soothing the forked feet
of huia birds
(from ‘In island stories, the intimacy of distance never lets memory entirely fade away (after Moana Jackson)’)
Throughout these poems flutter ngā manu; their presence is a leitmotif and their voices are a collective threnody. Indeed, Latham ventriloquises ngā manu on more than one occasion, as in the titular ‘Birdspeak’: ‘let me speak as if a bird’. Hopping and skipping ourselves through the pages of Arihia Latham’s Birdspeak, we encounter the expectant and alliterative: ‘I’ll stand there on the pae // breathing like a bird’, while further on in this same poem, in the final piece called ‘Defying death’, the call widens: ‘Turn us into birds’.
As the pages come full circle, fanned in a kind of murmuration, this reader recalls the avian ambience of the initial poem, ‘Hinehuone’, with its bird-flock-emphasising lines such as: ‘birds’ souls turning inside out’ and ‘Around us the birds’ and ‘The throats of birds’.
Ngā manu are around our motu the omnipresent symbols of te ora me te mate, te raro me te rangi, i mua me ā mua; and they fly and flock, swoop and soar ubiquitously, perpetually, almost subliminally. Thus riroriro, pīpīwharauroa, pīwaiwaka, kōtuku, kawau, koukou, ruru, kūkupa, kakapō, hōkioi are essential referents throughout ngā toikupu ki konei, while ‘wings’ is a repeated kupu in much of our poetry. Native birds are the harbingers, the messengers, ngā kaitiaki, ngā kakawaea i waenga i ngā ao Māori—te noa, te wāhi ngaro. Ultimately (as she addresses her fellow aeroplane passengers), the poet admits: ‘I start to cast us all as birds’ (from ‘All the fucks of a waterbird’).
Amidst this celebration of things avian, Latham also provides some finely woven other imagery, such as the extended metaphor of fiscal affairs paralleling whānau ones in the poem ‘The balance’. And in ‘Waitangi (for my Nan)’, there’s the highly effective:
‘Today’s long white clouds
are the damp sheets
pulled tight by
our raw knuckles.’
There’s also the exactness and self-recognition of ‘Genetic Fractals (from the perspective of my son)’, where Latham writes:
and I know you made me
but I have outgrown
your love
a belt one hole too tight.
Finally, in ‘Dust rises’, the poet declares: ‘I know I am Māori and I am grateful to feel my whakapapa hum in my bones’. Tēnā koe a Arihi Latham mō tō kupu tino tika.
Robert Sullivan’s (Kāi Tahu, Ngāpuhi) quite bulky Hopurangi/Songcatcher contains 111 poems arranged according to nearly three months of Te Maramataka, which are Te Ono o Whitiānaunau, Te Whitu o Hakihea and Te Waru o Rehua, respectively. Sullivan, as the back cover blurb tells us, ‘wrote and posted a poem a day over two and a half months’, the poems collated here. So there are lots of entries, the majority being brief. There is certainly a wide range of topics, too, from reminiscences about people he has met through to books he wants or has read or is reading, and across ngā kai me ngā kōauau, through to his own work experiences, self-doubts and resolutions, and on to several rather subtle yet pointed barbs at the colonisation of ngā iwi Māori katoa.
These poems are delightfully quotidian, whereby their tone of constant everydayness, even at times verging on the banal, is often propelled right up front to the reader, as in ‘Tamatea Tūhāhā: After writing this poem’, where we are told:
After writing this poem
I’m going to do some gardening.
Plant some kānuka
between the potatoes
and then get some
chicken wire …
It is great to see Sullivan incorporate much more te reo Māori in this book, especially as the entire framework of Hopurangi is intrinsically inside a Māori worldview/ethos, that being te maramataka. Ngā ao Māori, ngā kupu Māori nē rā.
Essentially, Sullivan is refinding, refining and redefining his way as a poet, as a Māori—most emphatically regarding his father’s Te Waipounamu whakapapa—and as an individual, the latter being exemplified by his resurrecting a Facebook presence after six years. He notes early on: ‘This book covers a period of personal change and growth.’ He is self-conscious but candidly self-aware too, as expressly iterated throughout the poem ‘Rākaumatohi: The house shadow’ in which he reflects that he is ‘too urban’ to pluck bloody roadkill and ‘not Irish enough’ to create a stew, while earlier he confesses that ‘generally I’m living an urban Māori narrative’ (from ‘Tangaroa Whāriki Kiokio: I have never emptied’).
Here are two more examples of this regenerative self-searching: ‘… I have an energy already today / I haven’t had for years’ (from ‘Turu: Just last week’); and ‘… I seem to have found / my mojo for everything’ (from ‘Tamatea a Ngana: Kia Tūpato’). Yet he is not just emphasising this personal contemporary resurgence; he is also well able to reveal his emotions, his reflections about his younger self, his own vulnerabilities as a sensitive male. He tells us in ‘Ōrongonui: The Corrections’:
A little voice from when I was littler
telling me I can’t speak te reo Māori
or speak at all, but I never heard …
Dunno why I’m dredging this up …
While in ‘Huna: Three poems from this morning’, he states:
Hēoi, āe, e te tāne nei
karawhuia te tangi whakaae’
(From there, yes,
let it out man, yes cry).
Sullivan is ‘carefully’ political; thus, he is never manifestly subversive, but rather, he is often subtly so. Examples of his anti-colonialist stance abound, where Sullivan rankles at Pākehā domination and dominion, although he does not use such pejorative kupu at all. Examples of subtle symbolism abound throughout this poetic diary, sometimes as a complete scenario such as ‘The Paper Chase’, in which Sullivan allegorically incorporates ‘giant kauri snails’, imagined as nibbling up Te Tiriti o Waitangi, but, unfortunately, not being able to devour the several versions of it, ‘in retribution for losing their forests and everything they deem to be precious’.
The poem, ‘Tangaroa Whāriki Kiokio: Another grey day’, sardonically puns on: ‘Another grey day, but when you think about / our colonial history, they’re all Grey days’. The powerful—and yes, somewhat angry—poem ‘Atua Whakahaehae: Chains’ hits the reader in the midriff with lines such as: ‘We looked for friends and made / enemies who stopped us / making sense …’ Generally though, this poet is never out and out nasty; he remains well-mannered and well-balanced, a mellow-toned fellow who never utilises working-class swearwords, but will go so far as offering up rather droll and dated expressions as ‘silly billy’ and ‘blimey’, which seem to be echoes of those used by kaumātua and other educated Māori in colonial years.
In the course of Hopurangi/Songcatcher, Sullivan’s illuminative examinations of himself as tinana, hinengaro and wairua bring in associated tangents associated with such catharsis, and Sullivan writes some fine lines of verse, for example: ‘Today’s rain is like television static’ (from ‘Hoata’) and ‘A uniform grey jersey covers the day sky’ (from Tangaroa-ā-roto: Star River’) and ‘this body is for once a cathedral with singing’( from ‘Atua Whakaahaehae: The Humours’). After all, he is working hard to ‘stitch me back together like an inverted poetry scarecrow’ (from ‘Korekore Whakapiri: ‘I threaded the eye’).
Towards the end of the book, Sullivan calls for he hopurangi/a songcatcher:
I need a hopurangi to wear
these cares into soothing songs
so that the fernbird mātātā
the tauhou wax-eye, riroriro
warbler, can return my song’
(‘Ōtāne: Songcatcher’)
Yet he is himself this veritable songcatcher. In a manner similar to that of the American Indian belief, whereby their mōteatea arrive in dreams often transported via animals, in Sullivan’s writing the waiata accumulating throughout his innovative and impressive treasury are often conveyed by birds, whether extinct and in museum display cases, or manifest as living entities delivering messages. Ngā manu anō.
Sullivan is composing distinctive lyrics and has been doing so for decades. I would nominate him as the next Poet Laureate of Aotearoa New Zealand. It is about time we had tētahi atu kaituhi Māori, nē rā. Nō te rohe o Ngāpuhi anō kia rite a Hone Tūwhare, te pūtake! Ka whakamutu tēnei arotakenga. Ngā kaitito Māori pūmanawa e toru. He pono! He tino kaha te awa o ngā kupu. Ko te awa pōkaka ināianei.
VAUGHAN RAPATAHANA (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Te Whiti) is a poet, novelist, writer and anthologist, and a critic of the agencies of English language proliferation and the consequent decimation of Indigenous tongues. He is co-editor of Te Awa o Kupu: Poetry and stories by contemporary Māori writers (Penguin New Zealand, 2023); and Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand (Massey University Press, 2024).
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