Pat White
The Midnight Plane: New and selected poems by Fiona Kidman (Otago University Press, 2025), 172pp, $40; Tackling the Hens by Mary McCallum (The Cuba Press, 2025), 86pp, $25; Touch Screen by Philip Armstrong (Otago University Press, 2025), 92pp, $32
The English poet W.H. Auden once said something about asking a young man why he wanted to write poetry. If the answer was ‘because I have something important to say’, Auden concluded that there was no hope for the young man as a poet. If on the other hand the answer was something like ‘because I like to hang around words and overhear them talking to one another’, then that young man was at least interested in a fundamental part of the poetic process and there was hope for him.
None of the poets whose volumes are the subject of this review are likely to claim ‘I have something important to say’, but a good place to start assessing their poetry might be by considering their desire ‘to hang around words and overhear them talking to one another.’
Any poet putting together a collection has, first, their everyday vocabulary to draw on. Then they can employ the thesaurus and the dictionary; or they may have niche language or specialist jargon; and now there is also, for better or worse, internet access to AI and its Large Language Models. The thing is, though, if poetry is to convince the reader it is verbally efficient and up to the task, the language used needs to sound, or read, as authentic to the writer, to the poet. So what interests me are the various ways these poets ‘hang around words and overhear them talking to one another.’
Looking at the dates of first publications will give some generational context. Fiona Kidman’s first published book was Honey and Bitters (1975), and a selection from that volume appears in The Midnight Plane. Mary McCallum’s first book XYZ of Happiness appeared in 2018, and Philip Armstrong published his first poetry book, Sinking Lessons, in 2020, as a result of winning the 2019 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award.
The Midnight Plane gathers work from across a stellar career in which Kidman has become a widely acclaimed fiction writer both in New Zealand and overseas. She states here, however, that ‘poetry has been my first love, my true calling as a writer’. Her early work was associated with the wave of women poets who were also attracting attention in the early 1970s: Lauris Edmond, Jan Kemp, Rachel McAlpine, Riemke Ensing. These voices claimed their own space on behalf of women, and didn’t back down. As Kidman puts it in ‘Return to Waipu’, she first staked her claim, riding:
… into town on a Road Services bus,
like the heroine of some Western movie
the unknown stranger, who yet knew it all.
By 1978, her second collection, On the Tightrope, is taking on the world, with poems such as ‘A businessman’s lunch’ employing a confident and forceful vocabulary:
He described with a flourish, between garlic
and dandruff, what a fabulous lay he was sure she would be
and then recoiled—
his skin crawling like a snake through grass
After this volume, the poet—as she tells us in her The Midnight Plane introduction—made the choice to concentrate on novels, stories, memoir, for reasons she doesn’t specify. Yet every few years Kidman returns to poetry, using language in its poetic forms to do a different job. And, as she acknowledges in poem no. 11 of her ‘Going to the Chathams’ sequence in her collection of the same title, she has continued to share the obsessions and interests of her poetic contemporaries, such as Elizabeth Smither, Michael Harlow and, of course, her long-term soulmate Lauris Edmond:
Elizabeth would say write down everything
you know about rock formation Kidman
Harlow would remark on an affinity
with buildings as if a hole in the rock
might present itself as shelter
Yet the atmosphere of 1975 feels in many ways a long time ago now, with its cultural and social attitudes, and its feminist liberation politics that helped shape the concerns of young women, all expressed in the language attached to that era. What The Midnight Plane confirms, through its carefully chosen poems taken from a life that’s been full of words, is how language lives. We evolve and become, we accumulate a history, we do not leave the past behind but rather we add layers and nuance to what has gone before—and writers express this through language. The process shows in the writer’s way of saying. By 1991, in the book Wakeful Nights, Kidman can say:
Do not think me changed,
my fabled fault and virtue
to love persistently, nothing
changes that. I have simply
learned to guard the word
beyond the powerful dark
Following the death of her husband Ian in 2017, Kidman again returns to the language of poetry to convey more than paragraphs of prose might do:
… this new condition
changes language: not we
or us or ours
but I or me
and mine, mine alone
The decades of devotion to language accumulate for Kidman. Her subject matter moves with the times, while the themes of truth to experience, loyalty to the written word, and the use of language with integrity and directness, remain throughout. This volume can be read and followed as a journey, in which the poet has used language as best she knows how, to take note of ‘the last winter roses’, of ‘little Cambodian dancers’, of a desire to ‘dabble over the stove’, and so show how to negotiate one life’s singularity through times of change.
· · ·
Philip Armstrong has different preoccupations in Touch Screen. There is for a start the obvious difference, as his book’s title indicates, of a revolution in the technology we use to communicate with one another, compared with Kidman’s devotion to the book as object. Armstrong writes in a space of computer science and electronics, where ‘pop-up’, ‘space bar’, ‘pixels’ and ‘You Tube’ are part of everyday word-use. But don’t for a minute take this to mean his eyeballs are glued to a screen all day. As he says plainly, in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’:
The young guy at the counter smiles and asks
me what I’d like. Straight off, instead
of words my mind goes to the sound of wind
through trees, a finger held to lips,
the intricate wood closing like a box,
the night sea smooth as a pillow.
This is a stanza signalling the poet’s concerns, where the natural world, outdoor life, boats and the sea, wildlife, and of course the sensuousness of words, are marked as central matters for Armstrong’s poetic engagement.
His poetry mines the past as seen from the present, but in ways that suggest a long, hard-earned apprenticeship in thinking about the way language works. In ‘Duet’ he sets it out:
to locate in me the mollusc virtues,
clam up, dig down, hold fast.
Learned to sow and sew.
To treasure grit.
This is a poet with a fine sense of paradox. The same poem finishes by showing how language can be playful and serious at one and the same time:
At least
These memories will do for now.
it’s what we make of it that matters
and matter’s what we’ve got to make of it
a marriage of coincidence
as lovely as the and between
the umbrella and sewing machine
left on the dissection bench
The reader has a job to do in some poems, where punctuation may seem ambiguous at first reading, but after what might be initial puzzlement, you realise that Armstrong is always precise, showing a wide range of form and mood, and taking care with his language so as to reward engagement. Touch Screen journeys from the irony of the poem ‘This bus kneels on request’ to the laugh-out-loud comedy of the poem ‘My own goals’:
by the time I reached the end
a swimmer overtook me, which meant I
placed second in the race after my own.
It seems there is nothing beyond reach in Armstrong’s embrace of subject matter. He will use science, or mythology, or gossip, or the bland-seeming but sharply noticed features of the landscape through which his daily movements take him, with ease. His agility, his acuity, deny any difficulty in producing poetry to cover any topic with conviction and insight. What helps tremendously is the breadth of Armstrong’s vocabulary, the facility with which he makes something strange by the accurate insertion of little-used words. Taking terms from niche subject usage and putting them into plain sentences, can create strange worlds within worlds. A sense of the unexpected or of surprise pervades more than a few of these poems. We are offered an energetic language of possibility, used with broad terms of reference, and a ready wit.
Of course it may just be my own lack of vocabulary, but I’d hesitate to play Scrabble or any other word game with someone who deploys words and phrases such as: ‘durian wood’, ‘abyssal fumaroles’, ‘chthonic suppuration’, ‘perfervid whatevers’, ‘brachiate’, ‘midtown Orthanc’, ‘xenotransplantation blues’ … It isn’t so much that the language is obscure or baffling, rather it is the facility with which Armstrong lets these terms and phrases infiltrate the work effortlessly, so that they belong and enhance without being the least bit out of place.
Armstrong is someone who looks around alert to the world’s strangeness, noticing how the component parts might fumble their lines, or get in each other’s way, or blend into unlikely alliances. At the same time, he’s able to express a sense of the sheer wonder of it all. ‘The Advancement of Learning’, the first poem, ends:
They say Aristotle made a hive of glass
for studying bees, but the insects
smeared the inner sides with clay.
An awareness of human frailty in the face of what the planet knows, is at the heart of Touch Screen. Armstrong’s blend of humility and laughter weaves a cogent, almost spiritual, spell; his entranced language renders a remarkable sense of the sheer weirdness of life on earth.
· · ·
One does not get that same ironic sense of accepting life’s uncertainties from Tackling the Hens, Mary McCallum’s second book of poetry. Rather, here we gain an impression of a poet diligently using her craft to map and confirm the world she inhabits. Stories of acquaintance and domestic belonging are quietly shaped within a sort of thanksgiving for blessings. The past is acknowledged as a contributor to present wellbeing, though often accompanied by concomitant feelings of loss. Location and connection are important, as we read in ‘Preparing for an exhibition’:
All the talk today is about this.
Helen, who lives in the house I used to live in,
who cooks in my kitchen, makes paper clouds
where we ate, alights on the word translucent
but moves on—
Titles of individual poems invite the reader into the poet’s world by providing place names or the names of specific individuals: ‘Gwyn Street’, ‘Taranaki Street, 8.30am’, ‘Wellington’, ‘Ursula’.
Once again, the concern is with how language works or renders perception, but with a different approach to the two previous poets in this review, as we see in the poem ‘Daughter’:
How fraught this word with its ‘h’
and ‘g’ appearing to snag
then letting the air through like
the door
left open to the gate
—or in ‘Landscape,’ where:
light both clarifies and
complicates—how a simple
landscape of skin, let’s say,
can become a whole atlas.
Here the X-ray, there
the scan. The hens
pant in the hedge.
Even in a world determined by the poet’s careful positivity, though, the inevitable cycles of life occur. Moving between the city of Wellington, and the life of home—‘over the Remutaka Hill’, where nurturing of family and friendships most often takes place—companionship is partnered with loss.
In ‘Weightless’, McCallum, in a way, brings the concerns of all the poets reviewed here into summary:
I can accept any explanation. I’ve
been reading the poems of a displaced person
and some of the strangeness she speaks of has rubbed
off on me. Not that it’s unfamiliar, the feeling of not
quite belonging, being at home, knowing the ropes,
in this country we sailed to from a hot continent
and sunshiney islands, decanted into a cold harbour,
the house in Island Bay whistling with southerlies,
wilding pines on hillsides, …
All three poets use their words to establish feelings of connection to the greater world we share with all life: the biosphere. Each poet shows how, in poetry, the senses are engaged in the effort to create a place of belonging. These are poets of this land, Aotearoa New Zealand, writing poetry that engages the reader through association. To belong to a family of some sort, to have familiar surroundings, is intrinsic to our being. The poet, though, stands at an oblique angle, doing their best to report on what they see, taste, smell or hear. Often they can appear to be strangers, the odd ones out, presenting a singular way of looking at things. As the Australian poet Les Murray once said, ‘The writer in the family is always an only child.’
When heightened language is elegantly and memorably deployed, as each of this group manage to do in these collections, the poet remakes the ordinary, demonstrating possession of an ‘inner wildness’ that allows them to express what William Wordsworth in his ode ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ called: ‘the visionary gleam’. Displaying that visionary gleam, each poet here has managed to speak truthfully of the tenderness, joys and fears of ‘the human heart by which we live’.
PAT WHITE is a poet and writer and graphic artist living in South Canterbury. His books include a biography of the West Coast poet and environmentalist Peter Hooper, and recent poems have appeared in Catalyst and Fuego magazines. He has been working on combining woodblock prints with poetry at a six-week Pop-Up Studio Residency run by Oxford Art Gallery.
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