Nine Bardic Voices

David Eggleton

Poetic Explanations, by Gill Ward (Kupu Press, 2011) 86 pp. $15.00; Guarding the Flame, by Majella Cullinane (Salmon Poetry, 2011), 69 pp., $29.95; On a Day Like This, by Jan Fitzgerald (Steele Roberts, 2010), 63 pp.. $19.99; cactusfear, by Douglas Wright (Steele Roberts, 2011), 86 pp. $24.99; Elemental: Central Otago Poems, by Brian Turner (Godwit/Random House, 2012) 240 pp. $39.99; Sometimes the Sky Isn’t Big Enough, by Owen Bullock (Steele Roberts, 2010), 64 pp., $19.99; You Shot My Dog, by Kerry Loughrey 100 pp., $Aus.19.95; Home, Away, Elsewhere, by Vaughan Rapatahana (Proverse, 2011) 208 pp., $30; Knucklebones: Poems 1962 – 2012, by Sam Hunt (Craig Potton, 2012), 360 pp., $39.99.

The voice of the bard, as Seamus Heaney notified us in the title of a series of lectures he gave on poetry, affirms the government of the tongue: that is, the authority of the poetic art to speak on behalf of the tribe, the people – or at least to speak with the utmost eloquence out of a community.
Gill Ward, a Kapiti Coast poet writes for and to her whanau, her community in Poetic Explanations, a collection of nearly 80 poems that she describes as an ‘autobiography’. In ‘Gathering’, a poem read at the unveiling of her sister’s headstone, she writes: ‘if we could gather every one of those thoughts/…and weave them into a splendid cloak/ we would wrap you in it.’ There’s a whole sequence for this twin sister, who entered a strict religious order when she was 18 before later returning to the secular life, and who died after a lengthy illness.

Ward’s poems seen in the light of this Roman Catholic connection resemble meditations, reflective notes, prayers. They are often, too, presented as valedictions or commemorations, intended for friends and family, as in ‘Kate’, also written for the unveiling of a headstone:

I bought two ranunculus today.
They reminded me of you
with their dazzling yellow and flaming red
flamboyant
uncompromising

And there are as many celebrations of just the little things in daily life as there are memorial poems: ‘They unsettle me/ my clothes/ the way they jostle/ and push/ always wanting to be the one/ but never quite matching up’ (‘Wardrobe’). Hers is a large output and somewhat uneven, but the power of her memories, of emotion recollected in tranquillity cannot be doubted when she writes of what rises unbidden to the mind in ‘Bombay Lemons'” ‘The bamboo thicket/ that shaded its dark mystery/ in the dank sand floor/ dust rising/ around our tattered gang’ This tattered gang, which contained the writer and historian Michael King, though only as a toddling hanger-on, seems to have consisted of Catholic kids, and it’s notable how strong this strain of Christian thinking – the fall from Grace, elements of the Catholic liturgy – is in New Zealand writing.

Majella Cullinane is a young recent migrant from Ireland, but in a way she refreshes this dispensation in her first collection Guarding the Flame, which takes its title from the myth surrounding St Bridgid’s flame in Kildare. And these days of ubiquitous political correctness, therapy-speak and psychobabble used as vehicles for an assortment of fashionable agendas, when humility has become equated with low self-esteem – you must ‘big yourself up’ – it’s noteworthy that she returns us to notions of renunciation, gracefulness and above all modesty as virtues to aspire to. And that such aspirations are intended is signalled by such lines as: ‘A star winks over Hillary’s step’ in her poem about mountains ‘Nepalese Meditations’. Many of the poems though in Guarding the Flame find Cullinane having a love affair with the New Zealand landscape, so that ‘flame’ might equally refer to the pohutakawa tree in summer, the poet trudging past this ‘cliff-dweller’ that offers green thoughts within its green shade, somewhere ‘Between amens and the Coromandel’.

Indeed, for Cullinane this new place is a treasure hoard of eye-brightening discoveries: ‘Kauri/ stretching its spine to scoop the first sight of stars’, ‘black fern canopies’, ‘the rain’s tapping song’, even ‘the scuttle of rats in the puriri joists’, all and each summon from her a kind of joy which weaves in with her pleasure in literature: ‘the mustiness of pages rises/ just as the salt air drifts across the beach/ to the crush of shells snagged on our feet’ (‘Paekakariki’). No wonder then that the organic promise implicit in the word ‘knead’ makes that word talismanic: ‘the dew…the word knead…a child pressing and folding within’.

Joy in the simple pleasures of life also characterises the second poetry collection of Jan FitzGerald, On a Day Like This, though her observant eye is also quick to register incongruities and absurdities, as well as implicit lyricism:

Slippered in displeasure
he enters the sepulchre of the Sunday papers,
peers through the glass at things buckled
and broken by last night’s unholy storm…
and though the wind has wrung
the neck of his white shirt upon the line,
its steaming like a hung goose
adds a certain denial to it all
(‘Two men in dressing gowns’)

FitzGerald writes with an humanitarian impulse about the discomforts of old age, as well as warmly of childhood memories: ‘Quarters of the moon…bobbing in a syrup of froth and foam’ (‘Bottling Peaches’), while she is especially effective in capturing inconsequential details that enrich the quotidian, whether the comedy of ‘the unshaven faces of ferns/ pressing through the fence’ or the pastoral fancy of ‘Cows crossing’:

A bony head looms alongside
turning a neck a child would love to swing from
…eyelashes come down

like slow camera shutters…
Her big, sassy hips sway past…
She is carrying a peach balloon to a party
that happened long ago.
(‘Cows crossing’)

FitzGerald writes out of an awareness of agriculture and cultivation, out of a sense of plenitude and repletion, of harvest where ripeness is all but there’s also melancholy.

The pastoral (and by extension the anti-pastoral) is one of the major considerations in New Zealand literature, and indeed in all its arts. In his millennial dance-work halo, choreographer Douglas Wright presented a touring show very much rooted in the New Zealand soil but also grandiose and operatic in its ambition, like Wagner with straw in its hair staged in a paddock out the back of Pukekohe. Now, in his second collection of poems cactusfear, he writes in the poem ‘herd’:

a herd of cows does not need a choreographer
left to themselves
they always fall into tableaux
of the most ineluctable grandeur…
reclining in massive undulations of serenity
or standing velvet Parthenon…
whenever I find myself speeding
inches above the graven earth
past bovined paddocks
I long to stop the car
get out
and go and lie down with the cows forever

Like those of Gill Ward, Wright’s poems constitute a kind of diary – or reverie – of daily life, but he’s always pressing towards the metaphysical: the meaning of the ordinary. (Significantly, he’s also a cradle Catholic.):

every night I take off my shoes and clothes
before climbing into bed
as if I was born knowing
how to unbutton, unlace, unzip
how to slither torso and limbs backwards
out of dark one-way tunnels of cloth
(‘to be gone’)

And more than this, for Wright the innocence of the pastoral affords a quantum of solace, but he also knows that it is never truly innocent, rather that it masks, or else leads to, a hellish descent: loss, rejection, the fires of the flesh, a charred gratuitous consumption by predatory forces. Many of Wright’s poems tilt towards phantasmagoria:

listening all night to the tiniest and bravest of sounds: the ghost-
mandibles of millions of white worms eating the resurrection into being

In fact Wright is a poet capable of making the mundane numinous; at times he is a mind watching itself experience the uncanny. In this he holds hands with the symbolist poets, the dandies and decadents of old Europe: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Wilde, Dowson. Draining his cup of medication, it becomes an inspirational potion that does more than help sustain his compromised immune system. It’s as if, much preoccupied by angelic orders of existence, he rises to hang out with seraphs and flirts with the exterminating angel. Sanctuaries and healing are ever uppermost; a Grail-quester, he is adept in the mind-concentrating – or emptying – practices of Buddhism. Yet with all these gestures towards dramatic leave-taking – as marked in poems with titles such as ‘undetectable’ – one of the most admirable aspects of Wright’s writing is his clear-sighted empathy, manifested for example in ‘Alice Thumb’, his poem for his cat: ‘sometimes she presents me with a half-devoured corpse/ so that we can polish it off together’.

Brian Turner is another poet of eloquent self-awareness who sings of the Arcadian, of a New Zealand pastoral: a poetry tradition which goes back to the Greeks and Romans, to Polybius, Theocritus and Virgil, but which in New Zealand has to mind its p’s and q’s, especially when addressing the farming community, which Brian Turner, living in Central Otago, lives amongst:

A farmer asked me
if I was working
and added
he didn’t mean
writing.
I said
I was sawing
and stacking wood,
tidying the shed,
pruning the hedge,
‘Is that work?’

‘Yes’, he said,
‘keep it up.’
(‘Keep It Up’)

So Turner listens and learns from the voice of authority, and writes as one who stalks Olympus and Parnassus, girded about with laconic utterances and sawn-off proverbial sayings that might be waved like farmers’ shotguns to ward off trespassers. Yet his antennae for self-deprecation are ever-alert, and wry humour prevails. While he’s referred to as a ‘bifocal identity’, he also offers up character sketches of the locals: the stud bull, the sheep flock, the farm dogs, the farmer ploughing on his tractor, the farmer at Oturehua who has the ‘most/photographed paddock in the district’. Holy balm in Central is symbolised by classical music – Beethoven and Bach – but the lyricism is all Turner’s own as he depicts a quintessential lunar landscape – ‘there’s a full moon/ hovering on the ridgeline of the Hawkduns’, ‘ a piece of moon/ like a parapente’, ‘an orange moon’, ‘mysterious moon’, ‘edgy light of the moon’ – in opposition to the sun which ‘blares’. For Brian Turner, as say for Sam Hunt, the sun is something to be wary of, its heat suspect and overpowering – they appreciate instead, like the Bronte sisters – the drama of rain and thunderstorms.

Turner is a poet of sense and sensibility, writing of apple-picking and inland fishing, of rivers and tramping, of lakes and alpine grasslands, while also alert to grace-notes of the bucolic idyll: the fog that sits ‘on the river/ like a marquee’; butterflies that are ‘bright cloth/ caught in webs of sunshine’.

Like Douglas Wright, Turner can celebrate with a disembodied lyricism that’s nevertheless grounded in the body, as when he writes of throwing himself on the mercy of the morning and floating like thistledown across the landscape on his bicycle, or catches skeins of wind with his ear: ‘I saw tussock, heard it/ speaking in tongues/ and chanting with the westerly’. Turner in these pages (contextualised by Gilbert van Reenan’s sensitive photographs of the seasons turning) worships the rural muse and traces her lineaments in the dynamics of the landscape: topography is also morality, though such conservatism – ecological wise words to safeguard the estate – is tempered by knowledge that the earth is always in a state of transformation.

Poets are defined by their heightened sensitivity towards language, which sometimes becomes an irritation with its inadequacies. Owen Bullock, in his first collection of longer poems (he is known as a haiku poet), Sometimes the Sky Isn’t Big Enough, offers oblique philosophical poems which argue the need for clarity and are wary of ‘echoes of previous meanings’. As Bullock explains in ‘the magnificent seven chakras’:

the mind is a tyrant…
heart rebels…
the base of the spine
trying to stay
with what it knows

Of all this congregation of bards, Tauranga-based Bullock seems the most pre-occupied by the business of preaching to the choir: these are poems turned in on themselves, as if doubting a reading public. Yet at the same time they affirm the simple power of language and hum with invention, with a teasing wit. As a poet concerned with what language is capable of, Bullock affirms a kind of mystical unity through isolated fragments of perception: which are in fact William Blake’s doors of perception, portals to playful ways of seeing:

you teach the park to play
show the bridge how to hold cars
I once lassoed a restaurant
and put it on an aeroplane

Thus is established a thin musical note sounding out, but also a pure and true one, requiring you to lean in to hear it.

Kerry Loughrey is a Melbourne poet with Otago connections who was very active in the Dunedin Poetry scene of the early 1990s, organising fringe events alongside the Roger Hall-initiated It’s All Write Here writers’ festival. Her first full-length collection, You Shot my Dog contains a long poem about Dunedin, entitled ‘Between Sunshine and Shade’, which is assembled collagist-style as a startling series of scenes or vignettes:

An earth tremor rocks my house
like a boat and I’m on deck
roof-top waves rise caught mid-ascent
the wealth of old Dunedin seas
undertowed up North
gold rush away their fault line full

In Loughrey’s work sound values are crucial. She’s aware of the libidinous energies invested in language, as her poem ‘Be genital with me’ indicates, with its lickerish wordplay. She favours the exclamatory mode, manifesting a sense of spontaneity and a forthright mouth music nurtured in the atmosphere of Melbourne pub readings and their strong bohemian tradition that includes such poets as Pi O and Shelton Lea.

Yet with all that her poems are carefully patterned and often delicately precise in their idioms, borrowing from early T.S. Eliot phrasings, such as those found in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Many poems are anecdotal, story-telling poems, and resemble perhaps amulets, good-luck stones to ward off ill-omens. In the end, it seems, the ‘quietness’ of Otago drove her and her family back to Australia:

By the River Taieri I sat down and selected
pendant stones for story carving
Peace isn’t made till the bones are showing,
the cliffs are slipping
and the earth roars nasty
(‘And in the yelling of’)

There’s a certain bleakness to the book, a sense of life as a series of penitential chambers where the only exoneration is a neat poetic image and sharp expostulation betokening the survivor’s optimism in the face of the Furies, who dictate one’s progress and the remission of sins. For Loughrey’s poems, too, lend themselves to a Catholic-raised reading, of sorts.

Her poems, which in recital have won her a number of Australian Fringe Festival Awards, allow for the public revelation of illicit thrills and spills, for the symbolic uncovering of taboos and finger-pointing at poignant truths. The most impressive of her pieces verbally tease; they kiss and tell and then refute and disown, as if moving on from a parable told.

In Vaughan Rapatahana’s most recent collection of poems blood’s a rover, trans-oceanic, as this Maori poet takes us with him from the coast of China to the coast of Thailand, from Nauru and the Philippines, to New Zealand past and present. Home, Away and Elsewhere establishes Rapatahana as a malcontent, or at least a critic, one for whom the intolerable wrestle with words led to a pyrotechnics of typology, in which whirligigs of poems done up in jazzy and playful typeface fonts shuffle and jive their way down the page like zoot-suited dancers in some old-time Auckland dance hall.

Identity politics leads to a Marxist interpretation of history in Home, Away and Elsewhere, so that the sons and daughters of colonised peoples – in particular Maori, but not exclusively – are characterised by degeneration, mental illness and addiction, of which Rapatahana is the sardonic, wearied or worried observer, nursing anger:

age shall not weary them
but
may be

those battalions of beers will…
while the steady pall
of roll-your-owns

shimmies…

the same saga
every Friday

(‘Matakaoa RSA’)

As Rapatahana defines it: ‘god is a weasel/ a possum/maybe/ a stoat’. Words squirm away from revelation and are remorselessly dragged back for further interrogation. His poetry is raw, confessional, blistering. We are told of: ‘Mother’s bruises/ even/ duskier/ than/ her/ cheap/ woolworths/ sun/ shades’. Poem titles such as ‘corrupted’ spell out textual intent. These are anecdotes from the front line of domestic trauma stretching back into the 70s and beyond. he offers a further take on a New Zealand gothic of busted marriages, madness, suicide. Stoking the nihilism, we are made aware of such imagery as drooling tongues that ‘swish’ like the tails of reptiles.

Elsewhere poems register the poet as prostrated with grief at various kinds of loss, or else marking off, rather as Kerry Loughrey does, domestic purgatories to be endured and later perhaps mined for a kind of resolution in the form of language. But this language is always fractured, jangling, distanced. Rapatahana has found an expressionist mode for authenticity by reminding us that print is really just marks on paper which you feel he’d like to score, incise or beat into the paper, as if onto skin, indelible as a bogan tattoo. His permission is gained from the typologically-daring Dadaists and Surrealists, Christian Morgenstern, Kurt Schwitters, Guillame Apollonaire, for like them, you feel, he has felt the shock wave of a war zone, emerging scarred and blitzed, even deafened, so that the he shouts in despair or ventriloquises, while any laughter is bitter.

At times the grotesquerie is a revelation, illuminating subtle undercurrents running through mainstream New Zealand, at other times it seems like mechanical crankiness or a coat-trailing bravado seeking to elicit responses. However, the doggedness of his achievement, for one senses that this is a writer who has been a long way down, may perhaps be registered or measured by a long-gestated poem that throws a verbal dart of witnessing description, pinning poet James K. Baxter by the sleeve of his too-large Salvation Army greatcoat to a dartboard in the back bar of the Kiwi Tavern, decades after Hemi’s actual demise. Tensile, springy, the poem snaps shut like a steel trap.

Sam Hunt’s Knucklebones: Poems 1962–2012 confirms him as author of an extraordinary number of love poems: the women to whom and of whom he writes are his denim be-jeaned muses, part dancing Graces and part pagan mysteries – wholly other, yet concisely, and perhaps immortally, delineated. Other poems acknowledge male mentors: Alistair Campbell (‘Rainbows and A Promise’), Hone Tuwhare (‘Hilary’), Frank Sargeson (‘A Salt Man’), though other poets previously acknowledged and perhaps more central, namely A.R.D. Fairburn and James K. Baxter go unaddressed this time around. So even this ‘collected poems’ is a work-in-progress.

On the cover the poet is posed in dark glasses, hands curled halfway into claws, rather like a hooded falcon, a karearea resting from the hunt. For there’s a hawkish quality, as of nature red in tooth and claw, to all of Hunt’s work. He took up, or was given early, the role, the duty of contrarian: one of society’s awkward squad, albeit its most eloquent figurehead, able to say in public what was muttered in private. But this latest book’s most recent poems suggest a poet fending off recriminations from all sides, rather like a wounded toreador, or farm hand perhaps, one beset by maddened bovines. Like Baxter, Hunt has proved the most culpable of bards, taking on or acting out the sins of the tribe, a knight errant or larrikin, depending on your point of view.

So, if early on he was the poet of desire and plain-speaking, his new poems suggest a more guarded and cryptic sayer, in fact his last book Chords could just as readily have been titled Knots, so crabbed and gnomic are many of its poems, like enigmas wrapped tightly inside socks. In this they accord with our modern understanding of poetry as a riddling and solipsistic art form offering peeks into private universes. Sam Hunt’s poems, more self-dramatising than most, are autobiography by other means, and he is a man who has in his time played many parts. He affirms the Romantic tradition, celebrating the self and the ego in the approved manner established by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth.

In Knucklebones we see him excavating the mountain of the self, contemplating his own mortality, his own body as a form of geology, incipient dust. This book confirms him as a master of the short lyric, a raconteur shaping his anecdotes into poetic artefacts of lapidary concision. Yet these late poems also constitute a kind of departure from earlier poems. They are, for example, almost cabbalistic in their counting of syllables, their use of numbers (tellingly the last sequence in the book is ‘Five knucklebones’, while Chords goes up to ‘Chord 42’). It’s also possible to describe recent ones as a danse macabre to a speeded-up funeral drum, as they increasingly mark the death of family friends and acquaintances, or reminisce about them, often in the form of a communion of spirit-selves in the world of dreams, remembered upon waking.

And always there is that sense of Sam Hunt as a kind of magus, working up spells and charms – and curses as well as charms. Forming melodious utterance from the everyday Kiwi vernacular, he remains exemplary – and guardedly mysterious. One poem in the ‘Chords’ sequence has him goggling in wall-eyed wonder at ‘white cliffs’. Are these the white cliffs of Dover, or some eschatological symbol? Is it a vision or an intimation? Hear the voice of the bard:

talking of the white cliffs…

You never thought you’d

see them again:

but you’re looking at them,

you’re looking at them hard,
you’re looking at them so hard
they can only stare back,

and drop if they could
from thought, from sight.

DAVID EGGLETON is the editor of Landfall Review Online.

Nine Bardic Voices

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