Harry Ricketts
It’s What He Would’ve Wanted by Nick Ascroft (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025), 84pp, $25; Terrier, Worrier: A poem in five parts by Anna Jackson (Auckland University Press, 2025), 84pp, $24.99; Overseas Experience by Nicola Andrews (Āpōpō Press, 2025), 93pp, $30
By a poet’s sixth collection, readers usually know pretty much what to expect. This is true of Ascroft’s latest, It’s What He Would’ve Wanted, though quite what that expectation amounts to is harder to pin down. Here’s a rough stab. There’s usually mental, verbal, rhythmic restlessness in an Ascroft poem, a sense of something manic barely under control. There’ll be uncomfortable laughter from the reader and often in the poem itself: Ascroft is, after all, the inventor of the grief limerick.
If the reader initially feels wrong-footed—oh, that’s where we’re headed now; no, we’re not, fooled again!—it’s as though the poet, too, feels wrong-footed at how life/the world/other people/this poem has or may turn out. There’s a constant sense of built-in frustration (one part irony to two parts self-laceration), which appeals to me, though some readers may find the masochism laid on a layer too thick.
Ascroft is a clever clogs and not backward in showing it. So ‘Another Poem with a Found Feather’ is a list-cum-fragment-poem, a poetic sub-genre with origins back at least to Christopher Smart’s ‘Jubilate Agno’ in the eighteenth century (some would claim it goes much further back). In more recent times, the American poet Gary Snyder has probably been the list-poem king. The Ascroft take, a parodic list of various kinds of contemporary poem, here and overseas, opens:
Another poem with a tui going nuts in a kōwhai.
Another poem with a kid, eyeballs strangled mid-epiphany.
Another poem with incongruous vocabulary.
Another with a day moon, clubbed by analogy.
Funny on the page, probably even funnier live. The whole poem may also (if this isn’t too gullible a reading) be a half-serious plea for another kind of poetry altogether. At least that’s one way to respond to the final line: ‘Another poem as useless at music as a penny whistle.’
Much as I enjoy this version of the Ascroft poem, the ones I like even more are those in which, in addition to the heady scrambled-angst-screwball-comedy, there’s also heart. (He might object they’re all heart really.) ‘Pig Magnet’, for instance. This offers an epically drawn-out description of the parental melodrama, mayhem and sheer pathos of getting kids to school:
The lift lowers us
to the basement then carries us back up
to floor seven as we have forgotten the lot:bags, batteries, keys, shreds of dignity,
senses of purpose and self-agency,
thunderheads of impotent huff, laptops,
sunhats, sunscreen, son, weeping now to be
so looked over by this calamity of fatherhood
and so on for many more lines of calamity and cock-up.
Even better is ‘Fair-Weather Friend’, an elegy or anti-elegy for a dead friend, Niki. Like many elegies where personal feeling is involved (Doctor Johnson’s ‘On the Death of Dr Robert Levet’, Tennyson’s In Memoriam), this struggles with how to be true to one’s own feelings while conveying a more or less accurate portrait of the friend and the friendship. ‘Fair-Weather Friend’ achieves this tricky balance by assembling an apparently haphazard jigsaw of recollections ‘before the data fade’. The closing sign-off is vintage Ascroft, ironic, self-disgusted and curiously moving:
The last thing she emailed:
‘Get on with it Ascroft.’
I had promised to send all the latest
gossip and complaints. Never
got to it. Didn’t get on with it in time.
She needed money. Louise
had made that clear. But
I never got to it.
Once, she transferred a thousand dollars to me
like it was nothing. The dead
can’t forgive, but I am abominable
enough to forgive myself.
· · ·
It’s a leap from there to Anna Jackson’s eighth collection, Terrier, Worrier. For a start, there’s that subtitle: ‘A Poem in Five Parts’, which stretches even the contemporary elasticity of the term ‘poem’. Part of me twitchily wants to slip in the word ‘Prose’ before ‘Poem’, since what follows is not really a series of poems per se, but a series of shortish prose pieces of varying lengths with white space in between, divided into five seasonal sections. Once I began reading, however, I became less hung up about categories and more immersed in what the pieces, discretely and collectively, encourage you to reflect on. Here is a by no means inexhaustible list of the subjects: hens, thought, consciousness, cats, near-death experiences, God, language, meaning, emotion, music, longing, happiness, Wittgenstein, dreams, memory, the ‘whole vast matchbox of the self’, bodies, peripersonal space and emergency rooms.
The experience of absorbing these often striking, luminous, burrowing, playful fragments of thought—sometimes teased out, sometimes not—is not dissimilar to reading, say, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, Pascal’s Pensées or Palinurus’s The Unquiet Grave and their many modern literary descendants: Anne Carson, Ali Smith, Patricia Lockwood … Here is a characteristic fragment, presumably the one that prompted the overall title and provides a kind of guiding premise:
This summer, I kept dreaming about a terrier. It was not a recurring dream but a recurring terrier that appeared in dream after dream, often needing to be released from somewhere it was trapped. It did seem as if my unconscious was hard at work trying to tell me something I was repeatedly failing to grasp. I thought, a terrier is a good symbol for the work of digging up something underground but still alive.
One of the underground ‘somethings’ the terrier keeps digging up and worrying at, and which runs throughout the sequence in a semi-submerged fashion, is consciousness itself, one of the biggest contemporary philosophical, biological, psychological, phenomenological issues. What is it exactly? Are humans the only entities to possess it? If hens have consciousness—Jackson’s own hens get more than a walk-on part here—does hen-consciousness resemble ours? In his celebrated 1974 essay ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, Thomas Nagel concluded we just can’t know what it’s like to be an animal, say, or a bird; more recent investigators, however, suggest we can reasonably speculate, and so does Jackson. Her engrossing shards of excavation also continually give us the sense, as poets like Coleridge and Plath can, of actually being inside another’s mind and innermost thought processes:
I thought, longing is the most meaningful feeling, because it looks both forwards and backwards. When you long for something, it is more than a hope for something in the future, because aren’t you always longing for something you lost, that you hope to restore?
Well, yes. And/or knowing it is something or somebody you can never restore? ‘I thought every body is an emergency room’: Just yes.
· · ·
Overseas Experience is Nicola Andrews’s first full-length collection, but it doesn’t feel like it. Their voice is compelling, the focus sharp, the control of form and register assured. Andrews identifies as Ngāti Paoa and Pākehā, yet these poems very much imagine their primary reader as Māori: many are bilingual, code switching effortlessly between Māori and English; some are in Māori on the left-hand page and English on the right; the opening poem, ‘Left on Read’, suddenly addresses the tūpuna (‘Tūpuna, have you ever googled yourself? / You might get more hits than you think’). The effect, for this Pākehā reader at least, is exhilarating, though a number of poems are hard-hitting enough about Aotearoa’s colonial history and ongoing Pākehā assumptions: two villanelles, in particular. ‘Slow News Day’ (drawing lines from a stuff.co.nz/politics post) opens challengingly:
Most locals disagree that their city is racist
Moaning that the woke townies got all offended
They reckon we’ll forget, but they cannot erase that
and ‘Land Ack’ ends sardonically:
Reparations? To start, you can stan my uni fund
Thank you very much for your kind donation
I do not accept your land acknowledgement.
Stop cowering, this is a bland admonishment
The villanelle is not a poetic form often used for political protest, but, with its inexorably repeated refrain lines (one and three in the first quotation above and three and four in the second), it is perfectly suited for the purpose. (Did you trip over the word ‘locals’?) So, too, is an even harder form, the sestina, to judge by ‘Koru’, which shreds the American businessman Jeff Bezos for giving ‘his yacht a Māori name’. ‘Shape poems’, like the wing-patterned ‘Hinting at Decolonisation’ and the steeply angled ‘Flight Path (10487 kilometres)’, which descends top right to bottom left, embody further ruptures and dislocations for Andrews, who grew up in Waitākere but now lives and works in San Francisco, and endures, as ‘Kuaka’ puts it, ‘the ache of having two homes’.
A version of this particular ‘ache’ is one all too familiar to the many immigrants here. So, although a number of these poems contain tracts of response just not available to a non-Māori readership, there are regular points of contact and relish for any reader. Everyone carries cultural baggage, good, bad and ugly, which collides and/or connects with where we are, how we see ourselves, how we behave and what we read.
These are heart-wrung poems; they’re often witty and funny, too. ‘This Meeting Could Have Been an Email’ will strike a chord with anyone bedevilled by the digital world: ‘This hierarchy could have been a vibration of ravens, whose shellacked throats grackle with love and solidarity’ (what a line!). In the last poem, ‘Bad Vegans’, a sister and brother awkwardly scatter their mother’s ashes around ‘the base of a protective oak’, closely monitored by mallards:
On the drive home,
They bicker about mineral leaching,
Waterfowl indigestion, and what flowers
They hope their mother will grow.
That’s an experience anyone can identify with.
HARRY RICKETTS is a poet and literary scholar who has published around 30 books. Until his retirement in 2022, he was a professor in the English Programme at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. His books include the poetry collections Winter Eyes (2018) and Selected Poems (2021) and the memoir First Things (2024). His most recent collection of poems is Bonfires on the Ice, published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2025.
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