Tony Beyer
in the cracks of light by Apirana Taylor (Canterbury University Press, 2024), 84pp, $25; Clay Eaters by Gregory Kan (Auckland University Press, 2025), 128pp, $29.99; The Anatomy of Sand by Mikaela Nyman (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025), 104pp, $30
Another book by Apirana Taylor, whether poetry or prose, is always good news. He is an originator and accomplished practitioner of what might now usefully be termed a Māori poetics in English, deeply sourced in whaikōrero. It’s no surprise, then, that the poems comprising in the cracks of light nimbly explore and exploit the border line between spoken and written text. Often brief and pithy, some have the piquancy of whakataukī or pepeha, refreshing and redeploying pre-existing tropes. Their wisdom is the kind that comes from talking and listening to people in the daily world, transformed by innate poetic instinct.
Taylor’s mastery of the short form allows him to gain enviable traction by the simplest and fewest means. Examples range from one-liners to an awareness of modern haiku and one discernible tanka, ‘praise’:
i’ve spent seventy
years looking
at the sunset
never managed
to make one yet
This is a good place to begin characterising Taylor’s approach—the natural world, lived experience, a quietly humorous humility and a truthful valuing of the idea of poetry. The last of these recurs as a concern in several poems, including the title piece with its image of creativity emerging from the contrast of dark and light. Poetry is established as an entity, to be sought but also not to be resisted.
Implicitly, yet consciously, Taylor’s is a Māori perspective when it comes to his use of language. The spoken aspect is dominant in chant-like poems which alternate statements in te reo with their translations into English. His wily use of the latter encompasses personification and direct address typical of public oratory and a use of puns that is sometimes genial (‘the poet tree / buds forever’), or sometimes sinister (‘punch you nation’). There is a beautiful moment of ambiguity in the longer poem, ‘between shoots’, when a group of Māori film actors in Land Wars era costume pause to reflect on themselves and their ancestors.
Having spent a lot of his time speaking in schools, Taylor knows that children and young people don’t readily tolerate being lied to or deceived. This factor is clear in two song-like poems dedicated to the kiwi, the first of which revels in lyrical description, while the second indicates the precariousness of the bird’s survival in an alarmingly changing environment. Here we feel the powerful influence of colonialism underlying many of the conditions Taylor’s poems lament. Repetitions emphasise the desire of a now older poet to pass on customary understanding to the young.
Politics, for Taylor, are straightforward and forthrightly expressed. While he acknowledges the wider Polynesian Pacific, his focus on biculturalism and bilingualism is central to his endeavour. In poems that recover cultural ground in both language and custom he is able to celebrate the renewal and value of Māori identity. He is also harshly critical of the desolation left in the wake of colonialism:
i am the Māori Tūmatauenga
my brother is
Tāne Mahuta
i have been here a while officer
(‘who are you’)
In some ways the entire collection could be summarised by Taylor’s one-line poem ‘epiphany’:
i am a living protest
Celebration, though, is part of the energy behind vigorous poems of place, descriptive and evocative echoings of mountains in particular, which feature as warriors and lovers, as in ancient narrative. These, too, are praise songs.
Poems later in the book turn towards Taylor’s interest in the visual arts. The enigmatic two-line ‘still life’ challenges the reader to enlarge upon the most economical of ingredients. Using erasure then restoration, the visual/verbal crossing of ‘lines’ (Inspired by the work of Tāme Iti) reminds us of the contributions of these two activists. Apirana Taylor has been a major voice in the Māori renaissance since the 1980s and has earned the right thereby to be taken seriously. Wherever public debate may take us in the future, in the cracks of light provides a masterly starting point.
· · ·
A hybrid of memoir, fiction, prose poetry and free verse, Gregory Kan’s third book, Clay Eaters, is distinguished by its subtlety. Memory dominates the mix as subject matter, but also as the object of philosophical inquiry into the nature of recollection. The overall impression is of a deft touch, inviting willing participation by the reader in the progress of images and ideas. In a quieter way, Kan’s vision of the impact of history and geography on individual lives resembles Taylor’s more cataclysmic view. The residue of British imperialism and the linguistic overlap Māori soldiers found with Indigenous people while serving in the then Malaya in the 1960s are also relevant.
The main location of Clay Eaters, in vivid description and memory, is Tekong, an island off the Singapore coast, taken over—and eviscerated—by the government to be used for military training. A former national service trainee’s voice in the past and present runs parallel to those of previous inhabitants and the blog of a thinly fictionalised supervisor of teacher trainees who used the island before it was fully converted. The effacement of history and cultural significance culminates in the removal of religious shrines once respected by both natives and Chinese immigrants. This kind of tolerance by ordinary people contrasts tellingly with the literally bulldozer approach of the authorities.
Not only customs and traditional practices are lost in the clearing process. There is a persistent reference to the way individual identity may be lost, sometimes with complicity. The young conscript remarks:
I learnt how to sculpt myself
Into a pure function
Make myself clean
Make my head grow thin
Compressed by the fear of
How I would stay intact
Between one world and another
Subsequently, given the role of a trainer himself:
At the school, I became ‘Mr LIM (Land Infiltration Movement)
Specialising in camouflage and infiltration
Mr LIM was a title neither personal nor earned
It was a predetermined function
The school always has a Mr LIM
And I was eager to become its latest vessel
Given the autobiographical context, we can be grateful such experience turned Kan away from this emptiness and towards poetry.
There are many interweaving and lateral strands in this book-length poem. One unifying clue is the opening dedication to a deceased but much loved cat, Gilgamesh, whose spirit is addressed and recounted intermittently throughout. When we read:
Memory will not be
Still
Trying to touch the bottom
Of the deep lake
And return to the surface
Clutching god knows what …
it’s difficult not to think of the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, whose deep dive brought to the surface the plant that would guarantee immortality to humans. Reminiscent of other creation stories, the plant was eaten by a serpent while Gilgamesh slept off his exhaustion. As Kan might confirm, memory is itself one form of immortality.
A review can only hint at possibilities in such complex and yet accessible work. Everyone should read Kan for his limpid originality and command of a wide brief, which he brings off impressively. Undertones such as the bitter destruction military organisation brings about even in peacetime are balanced by personal family situations, equally confronting and probably more worthy of people’s attention. The characters, including Uncle Chee Boon, Madam Dai, Mr Chin and ‘Mr LIM’ himself, are unforgettable.
· · ·
Urgency, tempered by the cosmopolitan breadth of her references and interests, is a principal driving force behind the poems in Mikaela Nyman’s The Anatomy of Sand, her first collection written in English. Sand, of course, is slippery stuff, hard to contain or control, like the margin between human existence and the rest of nature, if indeed there is one. Nyman pursues this flawed division through her images of the Taranaki coastline. Her poems, fixed very accurately in time and place, remind us of what lies beneath our assumed normal activity. Geology as much as geography.
Nyman’s delight in nature is unarguable in such poems as ‘Lonely sailors’ (marooned jellyfish—a crucial image), ‘The collector of seeds’ (uniquely witty and contemporary), and ‘Pufferfish season’. A more demanding piece, ‘Dunes of methane’ projects this delight into the more ominous landscape of the manipulated environment, a core message the collection as a whole bears out with authority and detail. That human nature and nature itself can never be separated without drastic peril to both is the recurrent tenet of the book. If this is ecopoetry, then it is of the most constructive kind. Inspired by a local issue (the proposed iron sand mining in the South Taranaki Bight), a poem like ‘Iron throne, submerged’ attains universal relevance. In many other poems, Nyman works through layers of inhabitation and scientific data, absorbed effectively into poetic form.
Originating from the Swedish speaking community in Finland, which has a respectable literary tradition of its own, Nyman has previously written with accomplishment in her mother tongue and has translated some of the poems here into English. Nevertheless, poems as exceptional as ‘If you seek her monument’ and ‘Spinifex and Velella’ don’t come easily in any language. ‘Of Wombs and Eggs (A Creation Story)’ is a potent feminist re-reading of the Finnish Kalevala, interrogating the male appropriation implied by this and similar folk legends. A writer with clear potential, Mikaela Nyman is to be praised for her aspiration, her achieved transition, and the territory she has marked out for future development. While her international viewpoint is a gift, she already belongs.
That these three authors arrive on the page from such diverse cultural and linguistic directions, each with its immemorial heritage, emphasises what a broad church poetry in Aotearoa is right now. That’s worth celebrating.
TONY BEYER is an award-winning poet and writer. Following a career as a secondary school teacher throughout the North Island he has lived mainly in Taranaki since 2005. He has published numerous collections of poems, beginning in 1971, and his work has appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and other publications.
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