Michelle Elvy
Town by Madeleine Slavick (The Cuba Press, 2024), 130pp, $30; Ash by Louise Wallace (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024), 160pp, $30
Madeleine Slavick’s Town includes poems, creative nonfiction and photographs—fifty stories and fifty images that paint the idea of place. It opens with a series of photographs: a sunlit house with two power lines stretching across a tall dark sky; a freshly painted white fence with a slit through which we see suburban roofs; a tree and a lake, with blinding light insisting its way through the branches; another clean space, this time a wall, the interplay of shadows surrounding the open gap/door; golden wind-swept grasses in evening light, a view to a town in the far distance. All of it belongs to the way Slavick builds town: trees, houses, fences, power lines, grasses, light. The stage is set.
The opening poem, ‘The Road Where I Live’, offers a gentle unfolding of images that seem to follow naturally from the photographs—cars and waving people, trees and smiles—but also: ‘Glass from a windscreen, empty cigarette packets, walls of stone, a dead hare and fences.’ This is everyday life.
With a view to the everyday, some pieces are very small, as if to say: look closely; be sure not to miss this. ‘Hello’ notes:
A friend takes me into town. Horses by the medical centre. Parsley and artichoke in the median. In a box at the end of the drive, books are left for the passerby.
A sign marks the town line in two languages. In Māori, the name speaks of song and longing. In English, a dead man and a suffix.
The town once flattened in ninety seconds, Roads lifted, mountains moved a metre. What is tilted is not always returned to position.
These first ‘greetings’ invite us to look, and look again. In this postcard-sized book, we come to learn that while a town is perhaps a constant kind of idea, everything in it can shift or change.
The micro-views are wide-ranging. ‘Landline’ is an exchange between a computer company and the author; ‘Pīwakawaka’, only two lines, reminds us of fleeting, darting love; ‘Kāhu’ tells of the journey of the bird in the hands (literal and metaphorical) of photographer, storyteller and carpenter. Woven into the urban landscape, the natural world is everywhere: hawks and godwits and pīwakawaka, eels and cows, rhododendrons and macrocarpa.
The photographer-writer is deft at painting images with words and suggesting how story happens in spaces we may not always look. ‘Jacaranda’ is about something taking hold, about waiting, about love. ‘Gentle’ is instructional but memorable for its surprising ease of lines:
Child, stay away from the hair of the ongaonga.
Cow, do now eat the bough of the macrocarpa.
Tūī, do not drink rhododendron nectar.
Prune the olive tree for the bird to move through.
Gentle take the nectarine.
Love the shape of the quince.
The collection, then, is observational (a photographer’s eye) and deeply personal (mother, partner, community member). And it’s quirky, too—charming in its encounters. Here, for example, the sense of watching and being watched, the play between stationary and moving things:
Five sheep stare at the movement of my body, five black cattle stand with enlarged udders, and five sparrows on a wire do not fly off when pigs squeal. I have always loved to count. (‘The road where I live’)
Whatever has happened between the objects or animals observed and the observer: that is the space where Town is alive. It’s in the occurrences between moments that story takes shape. This is a book about seeing but also sensing how the spaces are as important as the things we can see directly. This story is about what’s happening just out of view—the gorse, the thistle, the flax, the eel. There is always more than what you first encounter. ‘In te reo Māori,’ the author notes in the opening story, ‘there are more than one hundred words for the eel, blue-eyed.’ That gives us pause.
Indeed, the collection seems to represent life’s intersections; Slavick herself has lived between the United States, Aotearoa and Hong Kong. The external view weaves with the internal as we engage with themes of parenting, travel and the social-political realities of our world. Pieces such as ‘香 Hong 港 Kong 嗓 Song’, ‘(Not)’ and ‘Plane Trip’ offer specific experiences from the poet’s life. And in many lines, we feel family intimacy. ‘(Not)’ considers communication with a teenager; ‘Parent’ takes us down a thin road with night rain:
… I am alone with the child who has fallen asleep beside me, the night now less certain, the road longer, time older, and the only thing I know is that I want no danger.
And, relatable for all parents, there are moments of nail-biting worry, as in ‘200 minutes’, when the parents wait and wait till they finally see the headlights coming down the gravel drive. This is the tender and astute conclusion of this small story:
The daughter as miraculous as the day she was born. Not alone, not afraid, and not yet able to understand us.
Here and in other places, there is unease, and also a sense of impermanence even beyond parental worry. In ‘Every tree has a story’, we are dropped into unexpected moments with the papaya, the red and white pine, the cherry and citrus, the cabbage tree, and more. In each, we are reminded that the encounter is a passing thing and that we ourselves are passing in our experience and our knowledge: ‘A cabbage tree not cabbage, and not a large lily and I first saw the tree in another hemisphere and called it a palm.’
The piece ‘Town’ begins:
A town might be a city.
A city might be a country.
A country might be a volcano.
And I wonder if the idea of ‘might be’ is what holds the whole together. That and the beautiful centrefold lines about wind, presented in English and te reo Māori (translation by Basil Keane), which suggest we pause and consider this moment before it’s gone:
In one minute the wind moves one mile
Kotahi atu te hau—Kotahi meneti, Kotahi maero
*
All night the wind / changes its mind
Whakataka te hau ki wīwī, ki wāwā / pō iho anō, ao ake te rā
If Slavick’s book is about the idea of place, Louise Wallace’s Ash is about the oppressive reality of an unescapable place. Thea is a vet living in the shadow of a mountain about to burst. Pressure underscores every page, beginning with:
The heat crowds out the town; it’s melting all over the kerb. It pushes down and under the roofs of the sheep yards, suffocating the men and women …
Thea walks in loops—fearful of the open road. Maternity leave is an uncomfortable place. Her husband Nick, a professional marketer, is marketing even to her. A Rottweiler lurks. A boy in Canada has been missing for years; an errant piece of polystyrene juts from a garden.
That’s just the opening—are we anxious yet?
Wallace paints this world of a woman on the edge of crisis with precision, flair and well-placed wit. Her skill as a poet is clear: imagery and timing are everything. Her storytelling holds us all the way through. And her punch delivers.
In a novel I read before having my babies, a woman wanted to escape her life and ran away to the mountains.
But I live under a mountain. I am already here.
The story reads fast. However, it’s in the small moments that the accrued knowledge of Thea’s life builds. A friend whose husband gave her a bikini trimmer at Christmas; a husband who expects his wife to cater to his mother; an office with assumptions stacked against women; recommended reading of an unwanted kind from an unwanted source; an offhand comment snarled into everyday life. Wallace writes a subtle story of aggression and dominance. There’s a moment after a hostile office exchange when we are held in stillness:
I stare through him with the eyes of a woman who has existed longer on this earth than the trees, than birds, than time itself. I stare through his skin, through his brittle, pale bones, through to the blood being pumped around this hysterical frame.
Slow down and you will feel the seething focus.
It’s a short novel that carries its power in the way the story is told. There is Before, and After (and a second After, and more). There is a job, a husband, a child, a mother-in-law. And there are also careful notes of connection, of rescue, of safety. Some of those come with Thea’s job as a vet—for example, this moment when a cat has to be put down, when ‘Mrs Rogers asked if I can open a window to let out his soul’. It’s quiet and unexpected—and beautiful.
The poet-storyteller is adept technically. The accompanying ‘illustrations’, set apart from the story in boxed containers, introduce layers: commentary, questions and lists, stream-of-thought moments in mothering, necessary checking-in, field notes, lists—and the repeated and building pressure pots of ‘catastrophising’. Playing with shape and form, the author manages to push and pull at the edges of the reader’s mind; these stay with us as much as Thea’s storyline.
Even more intriguing, for me, is the sub-story that begins in the second part and runs along the bottom of the page, connecting the experience of one woman across time and space to other women, all women. It happens when Thea is thinking of the pioneer women’s tales, of things they didn’t say. She writes of:
Tales of tough, stoic, pioneering women thriving in trying conditions. Fucked-up fables, morality tales, pleasantries and half-truths. I think about the things left unsaid. … What would it look like if anyone could be honest? The stories might start off ordinarily enough.*
And then we move to the bottom of the page:
*The pioneer wife had made it across the river to the new home—a cottage perched at the base of a mountain.
See how she did that? Here we are, living under the mountain. Again. Always.
There are some noteworthy parallels as we move through these stories. On one page we read in the main story / Thea’s story:
The mountain whispers to me that night about things that should never have been bought or sold, brutalities it has seen—blood-red.
Everything that comes from the mountain stems from this hurt. It pulses.
And in the pioneer story we read:
She listened to the husband speak at dinner—his fact-laden voice,
his observations, his manipulations of the tongue.
Some pages later we come to this, in Thea’s story:
The only sound is the mountain—the noise of something escaping.
And in the pioneer story, on this same page:
… and succumbing was simply a consequence of living.
And here, Thea:
I miss my mum and what my mum is missing out on.
My home is not my home
The floor is lava and I am wading in it.
And the pioneer:
As in, mud moving. As in, harmonic tremors.
Finally, there is the central metaphor of the ash itself. Heavy, settling, covering. The poetic lines that close the first section of the book (the ‘Before’) float across four pages in a breathless pause. The suspense hangs in the air; we rush with Thea towards her children on the other side, but before we can get there we come to
Memory is different from ordinary
house dust
and we drift through these pages, lifted in a cloud of uncertainty, hoping for shelter. We are suspended in this reality of Wallace’s making: the ash that is raining down.
The themes of ash and memory weave in and out; there is panic—immediate, practical, moral, spiritual. There are decisions to be made: the pioneer woman must decide to go on or turn back: ‘As with everything, there was a before and an after. All who come must cross the dividing line.’ There is the question of the mountain—and does the mountain always have to be the mountain? There are transformations, from solid to liquid to a body in flight.
The story keeps unfolding, and we cheer Thea’s strength and gentle touch, for here is where—along with the burden of history and the flurry of immediate circumstances—there is love. Love is not light, nor is it burning bright. But it might be constant. It’s not surprising (Thea is a vet, after all) that we end in a field with a heifer. But I’ll not close with that. Instead, let’s go back to an earlier moment, also in a field. This passage stays with me:
I have seen a man sing to his horse after I administrated a sedative. He rested his forehead on the horse’s muzzle, their eyes lock together. He gently stroked the horse’s mane and sang softly in what might have been Italian. The eventual thoomp on the ground as the horse toppled to its side.
That is how heavy love feels.
MICHELLE ELVY is a writer, editor and teacher of creative writing. Her books include the everrumble and the other side of better, and she has edited numerous anthologies, including Te Moana o Reo Te Moana o Reo | Ocean of Languages, edited with Vaughan Rapatahana (The Cuba Press), and Short | Poto – The Big Book of Small Stories | Iti Te Kupu, Nui Te Korero, edited with Kiri Piahana-Wong (Massey University Press).
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