Murray Edmond
Two Walk in Edinburgh, photographs by Mari Mahr, poems by Gregory O’Brien, afterword by Jenny Bornholdt (The Holloway Press, 2011, $225.00); A Morning Walk in the Later Days, by Leonard Lambert (Cold Hub Press, 2010, $18.00); Devonport: A Diary/Esplanade, by Bill Direen (The Holloway Press, 2011, $100).No book is just a book: it is always framed by the occasion of its production. In the instance of the three books under consideration here, we have two books as objets d’art (Devonport and Two Walk in Edinburgh) and one chapbook (A Morning Walk). These two types of book are at the opposite ends of a continuum. The term ‘chapbook’ comes from those who once sold them: chapmen, hawkers of tracts, ballads and pamphlets. ‘Chap’ itself originates long ago in the Old English word for ‘barter’. Leonard Lambert’s A Morning Walk in the Later Days belongs to a series of poetry chapbooks from Cold Hub Press in Governor’s Bay. The other two volumes are from Holloway Press and the material stakes and aesthetic values are at the high end of the market.
Having myself created a book of writing plus photography (with Joanna Forsberg’s photos) for Holloway Press (The Fruits Of, in 2009), I’m not sure I should be commenting on another Holloway book of photos and writing, especially one that seems to do everything opposite to ours; this Mahr/O’Brien book being clear, logical, illustrative, descriptive, black and white, very much to-the-point. You read the poems, and you read the photos – or rather you scan the pages, as Vilem Flusser terms it, as if running your hands over them, as if scanning with two hands – in the manner of a Braille reader: one hand reading the structure of the image, and the other hand reading the observer’s intentions. As the observer in this instance, I must now reveal my intentions.
When you read Gregory O’Brien’s poem and it says, ‘The hand contained but one/thought, the unopening window/another’ and the photo opposite contains a hand and a window and the next poem reads, ‘With its invisible hands and clock-like face’ and the photo opposite shows a disc like a clock face without hands and a single number (‘10’) on that face and the face is mounted on a building façade like a public clock might be, and so on, then you know you are in the realm of the symbolically illustrative: poem illustrates photo, photo illustrates poem, encoded meaning is doubly doubled. The problem with this is the redundancy. Nothing much is added by either component. The hope is that the partnership will create an intensification by repetition. Mahr’s photos, in themselves, already to some extent operate like intensification systems. They are curiously like stills from a Bergman movie from the 1950s (Winter Light or Wild Strawberries). There is not much composition of image, rather a literary placing of objects in the frame (a plaster hand, a sizing brush, an old book, a sunflower, or most Wild Strawberries-ish, a pocket watch slung round a stone pillar). All this in black and white only. These are images for decoding in a linear way: ‘What does the watch mean?’ the photo asks us. In her note at the end of the book, Jenny Bornholdt tells us what the watch means: ‘In this moment time is held.’ So we know, in that kind of way. Holloway Press produces beautiful books of a wide variety within the book-as-fine-art-object-in-itself type. This one feels exactly like that type of book should be, but not more than that.
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Leonard Lambert’s poems focus on coming to the end and looking back. It’s that moment in life when ‘the long ago’ is ‘oddly close.’ What the hell did father do about this moment? He tried to get his bearings: ‘My father was always putting up weather vanes.’ It is not hard to hear the vanity in this. Lambert’s poems sniff out vanity, as if he himself was that ‘greying dog’ he uses as an image of ‘winter’ (and it’s not really winter, it’s his approaching old age as if he were winter, and so the images circle back and bite their tails). In the poem called ‘Community Service’ he claims life is more a ‘sentence’ than a ‘gift’. Yet you get the sneaky feeling that he’s quite enjoying being here and noticing that it is like this. These poems are subject to their own usurpation.
It surely is the hour of the final death-knell of World War II fathers, here and in Jeffrey Paparoa Holman’s book Fly Boy (Steele Roberts, 2010). But we should make a clean breast and confess that these small laments are for ourselves. It’s all a ‘swan-song of sorts’ as Lambert notices as he writes about remembering the Vulcan bomber flying over: ‘a small boy’s heart stood still.’ Dead then, and now soon to die. Rue the day. Maybe at such a moment there’s only loss to remember, but what can poetry do about this? That question is not taken up here and it might have made the poetry more alive, while there’s still time, if it had been. Ovid noted it all in the opening of his Metamorphoses, how the Golden Age gave way to the Silver, then the Bronze, and last the Iron, but immediately he went on to tell all those stories of transformation.
Bill Direen’s diary of his time of holding the Michael King Writing Fellowship at the University of Auckland and living in the Signalman’s House on Mount Victoria, Devonport, which is part of the Michael King Centre, juggles with and meditates on the problems of the diary form itself; whether the quotidian should be filled with the marvellous or the mundane. He confronts the insects in the kitchen, and relates this sense of embattlement to living next to the naval base and on a hill with gun emplacements dating back to the imagined Russian invasion of New Zealand. He stands on the edge of the lapping tide and launches into a delightful diversion about the moon, the tides and the ‘principal lunar semidiurnal’.Finding a good diversion is counter-ballast to plodding though the days, diary-style. There is something quaintly Beckettian in Direen’s counting and numbering and obsessive trips to the tide line ‘to stand calmly by the water.’ The aimlessness of being a writer begins to shine through. My grandmother once asked me, ‘What do you want to write poetry for’ and I took the opportunity to play the smart-arse and reply, ‘That’s the point, it’s pointless.’ Direen, who, has lived in France for some time (as Beckett did) plays the scales of existential and geographical alienation: ‘I’m not of this place./Am of this place.’ The Beckett echo is from the end of Waiting for Godot: ‘Let’s go. They do not move.’ Direen looks at the landscape and see its impermanence, of which the tsunami is one possible agent: ‘everything is bach-like/it could all go in a wave.’ Vladimir in Godot looks at the landscape and describes it as ‘indescribable.’
Direen’s diary goes beyond description, whether literal or symbolic, in search of an awareness of the endeavour of writing itself, surprising himself in discovering what he is engaged at. He wonders how to know if the diary form is finished. Quoting Matisse about not repeating a line, he questions the validity of re-writing. Just as a book is never simply a book, so he notes that there are many kinds of notebooks. The notebook, basis of this printed diary, returns the reader’s focus to the moments of composition. And this notebook/diary records the moment of the September earthquake in Christchurch, where Direen’s father and brother and sister-in-law are located. The writing response to the quake consists of a series of Joycean (James Joyce being Beckett’s mentor) language flourishes: ‘Manmade … mad made.’ At the core of this intriguing meditation, in its plain and tasteful Holloway Press presentation, is an ambiguous curiosity about the very act of recording in writing – ‘Writing dares to oppose all that disguises things as they are’ (p. 25) – that might derive from the elegant paradoxes of French literary theory. At the same time, Direen’s writing contains an almost naïve directness: ‘I will probably never live in such a nice place as the signalman’s house …. ever again.
A short fiction, ‘Esplanade,’ is appended to the diary. Once again Joycean flourishes appear, this time as the call-girl approaches the Esplanade Hotel where B (the particle) waits. For Direen, like Beckett, French and English are his writing languages. Like Beckett, when asked whether he was English (and the same would apply if he were asked if he were French) he could reply: ‘Au contraire’. He is located here, in his diary.
MURRAY EDMOND teaches drama at the University of Auckland. His most recent volume of poetry is Walls to Kick and Hills to Sing From: A Comedy with Interruptions (AUP, 2010). He edits the on-line journal Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics: http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/kmko/
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