Robert McLeanYou’re So Pretty When You’re Unfaithful To Me, by David Howard, with images by Peter Ransom (Holloway Press, 2012), edition of 75, $240; this hill, all it’s about is lifting it to a higher level, by Vaughan Gunson (Steele Roberts, 2012), 64 pp., $19.99; Jumping Ship & Other Essays, by Glenn Colquhoun (Steele Roberts, 2012 )146 pp., $24.99; Memory Gene Pool, by Michael Morrissey (Cold Hub Press, 2012), 28 pp. $19.50.
Sounding a Wintersian note from the get-go, I assert that David Howard is our finest poet. That out of the way, according to the notes at the end of his marvellous the incomplete poems, ‘The whole of boredom’, the guts of You’re So Pretty…, a livre de luxe from Holloway Press, ‘responds to the graphic works of Peter Ransom.’ Via this pictorial route, Howard brings back to us or us back to the scuzzy wired punk scene of ‘80s Christchurch decades after its expiration. It was a milieu replete with ‘characters’ of the kind enquired after at boozy 40+ dinner parties: ‘what ever happened to…’
Small-town Christchurch being what it is, I am only a few degrees of separation from the dedicatee of You‘re So Pretty.
You’re So Pretty I remember Eddie from when I was a boy, heavily-inked, and tootling his long-suffering trumpet in the purple shadows of bronze functionaries in our hometown’s public square. Lately, after hardly a thought for 30 years or so, he is the ex-husband of a friend of my wife. Such intersections, correlations, relationships, and such like are the stuff of Howard’s book. A step this way or that, and one might think or find oneself to be in a different world.is bookended by two poems addressing its dedicatee. Between these are four shorter poems. The heart of the matter is ‘The whole of boredom’, which pivots on the phrase ‘Yes is irregular; it/upsets the order of things, being active’; ‘The soul of whoredom’, its briefer companion, does likewise on ‘No is irregular yet/sets the order.’
Accordingly, Curnow’s “Skeleton of the Great Moa” is given the insurgent treatment more often than I care to count. Curnow is an easy target due to his impressive size; one can’t fail to score a hit. And, having gone through a book flanked by a pair of serrated hymns, I’m led to wonder, bastardising Geoffrey Hill’s poser, is Howard’s intention to dispense with grace; or to dispense, with grace? This isn’t a question of justice, of doing it, in this case ‘Eddie’, justice, but of grace. It’s sad and angry, but there’s little consolation. I can’t help but think of Eddie as Barabbas – and wonder who then is the poet elect, dispensing or withholding grace? Upon Howard’s shoulders seems to rest the weight of the word – perhaps, too, of The Word: an old concatenation, but in Howard’s case an apt one.
You’re So Pretty I remember Eddie from when I was a boy, heavily-inked, and tootling his long-suffering trumpet in the purple shadows of bronze functionaries in our hometown’s public square. Lately, after hardly a thought for 30 years or so, he is the ex-husband of a friend of my wife. Such intersections, correlations, relationships, and such like are the stuff of Howard’s book. A step this way or that, and one might think or find oneself to be in a different world.is bookended by two poems addressing its dedicatee. Between these are four shorter poems. The heart of the matter is ‘The whole of boredom’, which pivots on the phrase ‘Yes is irregular; it/upsets the order of things, being active’; ‘The soul of whoredom’, its briefer companion, does likewise on ‘No is irregular yet/sets the order.’
Accordingly, Curnow’s “Skeleton of the Great Moa” is given the insurgent treatment more often than I care to count. Curnow is an easy target due to his impressive size; one can’t fail to score a hit. And, having gone through a book flanked by a pair of serrated hymns, I’m led to wonder, bastardising Geoffrey Hill’s poser, is Howard’s intention to dispense with grace; or to dispense, with grace? This isn’t a question of justice, of doing it, in this case ‘Eddie’, justice, but of grace. It’s sad and angry, but there’s little consolation. I can’t help but think of Eddie as Barabbas – and wonder who then is the poet elect, dispensing or withholding grace? Upon Howard’s shoulders seems to rest the weight of the word – perhaps, too, of The Word: an old concatenation, but in Howard’s case an apt one.
I find Howard is most attractive when at his most cosmopolitan and, it seems, correlatively, imaginative. Yet in these poems he often comes on less like Diogenes the cosmopolitan debaser of coinage than the naked snipe demanding the ruler of the world stand out of his light. Howard’s syntax is crabbed, its units bite-sized and epigrammatic, bitter to taste. Yet ‘it has nothing to do with feeling’ (‘The soul of whoredom’): must sensibility hold sway? To oppugn the literary status quo won’t win a writer (many) prizes; but, for me — if complemented by a living body of work — it’s a good sign. Howard usually has the sense to save his jeremiads for elsewhere than his poems. These poems suffer from their own barbs, though far from fatally. Indeed, to be put out or off by these poems almost amounts to finding love repulsive.
Withering scruples temper Howard’s capaciousness. His peers are poets of such an ilk and character as Clive Wilmer, John Matthias, and John Peck. And, it must be said, Allen Curnow. His poetry is muscular and burnished when so much else is limp and etiolated. Rebarbative, scabrous, strident, prickly: why not make the leap to condign satire? Howard, with a clutch of prods, might just be the Swift de nos jours. I find it disagreeable to mention poetry other than Howard’s when space is at a premium, but to emphasise its difference to the buzz and clinker that swamps it seems worthwhile. Whilst You’re So Pretty isn’t my Howard of preference, I still prefer it to most else.And I’m pretty sure I’m right to do so.
*
Whereas Howard got me thinking, Vaughan Gunson’s poems in this hill, it’s all about lifting it to a higher level did quite the opposite. My mind, for what it’s worth, utterly emptied. In this hill percept is never mediated by concept. This is why Gunson’s avowed concern about ‘the ecological, economic, and political challenges facing New Zealand and the world’ isn’t apparent to me in these poems. Gunson ‘has been active in a range of organisations and campaigns’ – yet his poems are noteworthy for their lack of movement, verging on stasis (I sincerely wish jacket copy was relevant to the contents of the books which they grace). His poems are colloquially civil. I was reminded of what Auden said somewhere about the importance of minor writers — as teachers of good manners.
Gunson’s poetry presumes a deep investment in the world, which is commendable, but it wants for an equally profound stake in language. Although he eschews cliché, his diction is so conventional that the clarity of his percepts becomes all but vaporous. A week after having put down his book, I could recall the occasion of this or that poem, but not a single turn of phrase had stayed with me; situations rendered in potentially capitalised abstract nouns and copulas, but nothing particular of the renderings, no delight in language. In successive poems we are informed first that ‘it’s 2.30 in the afternoon’, then that ‘it’s 4.55pm’ in the next — specific, but bland and inconsequential. From ‘Saturday morning, 19 March 2011’:
100, 1000, 10000, more
lives
obliterated
The problem with this is made plain in comparison with some lines from the poem ‘Identities’ by astounding and confounding Mathew Mead:
We stand here.
Statisi.
What is more abstract than numbers? What better obliterates lives? And what, in fact, is more political? In such moments I was often reminded of Gary Snyder’s poems, which I was happy to have forgotten. A more pleasant moment was encountering ‘the gumdigger’ – my spell-checker balking at the democratic lack of capitalisation – seen ‘through the window… digging up the kikuyu grass’ is more substantial and ‘the yucca in the blue ceramic pot’ sticks in one’s teeth (although reading it over, I wonder at all those definite articles, seeing clearly they don’t at all give definition).
Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of first-person singulars in these poems; so, too, there is writing about writing, poems about poetry — but Gunson is mindful not to arrogate his ego into poem while remaining personable. However, in ‘everyday’, Gunson lists some stuff he ‘likes.’ It’s not a long list, but it is a list nonetheless, and I since I like ‘long lists of proper names such as Old Testament genealogies or the Catalogue of ships in the Iliad’, my interest was piqued, momently, for, in the end, Gunson simply lists some stuff he ‘likes.’
I reckon the world is worthy in itself of our attention; it takes more than namedropping it to make words worthy of it in turn.
*
Glenn Colquhoun’s Jumping Ship & Other Essays is a miscellanea of fugitive pieces, apart from the titular essay, which was previously published by Four Winds Press in the Montana Estates Essay Series. The heart of the book is the title essay, a billet-doux tendered with respect to an affair of the heart Colquhoun had with one Aunty Rongo, a feisty 80-year-old matriarch. I think to qualify the relationship would surely do it an injustice; it’s enough to say the relationship seems to have been enjoyable to both parties, and both – in their own ways, of course (as Colquhoun puts it ‘I am Pakeha. She was Maori’) – seem to have been enriched by the experience.
Following ‘Jumping Ship’ there are twelve poems written to ‘an old woman,’ none which really add to the impressions or sentiments conveyed in the essay. One difference is that exclamation-pointed gerunds are frequent in the poems. Further on, there are four poems for Hone Tuwhare, none of which offer any surprises. Apparently all was as it seemed, which, I suppose, is well and good. But perhaps it’s more important to wonder what Colquhoun has left out, elided, or excised. Surely there was more going on than mutual respect and housie. What aren’t we being told?
According to Colquhoun, we have been told everything. In an interview on National Radio, he nailed his colours to the mast of a literature which is ‘completely open and accessible…telling us something that is real about living life…I think of it in terms of connection.’ This, to say the least, is ambitious. And, thankfully, it is impossible. And if we have been told everything, or at least everything that matters to Colquhoun and ought to matter to us, the feeling I’m left with leads me to question Colquhoun’s motives. It’s simply not enough. Honesty is its own end. Politics is easy when it’s one-on-one or you and I. And literature — I mean the glory of it — has nothing to do with honesty in love or politics.
Jumping Ship is as open-hearted and open-minded as one would expect. The problem with it is that the writing is never more than workaday; often, it is downright hackneyed. If Colquhoun takes risks in love, he certainly doesn’t do so with words. From ‘Waiata aroha’:
It was autumn when I found you.
At that place Maitiretoha-waved-goodbye.
The leaves were falling.
I had been walking on a stone road.
One night we talked until the morning.
And so on. No doubt this is what it claims to be: a love song. And no doubt the experience that informs it means much to Colquhoun. The second line is passable, but it’s largely of language’s own making; the rest of the words are dead on the page.
All in all, Jumping Ship offers prospective readers tales told in an amiable tone. And that’s it.
*
‘If the unrecorded life is not worth living/then we must write it down with scruple’ – these, I assume, are Michael Morrissey’s words taken from his poem ‘In Reverse Order’. Memory Gene Pool, the Cold Hub Press chapbook into which this poem has been gathered, sets itself, adamantly hardnosed, to the aforementioned task, with often disquieting relish. In ‘Arrival’, Morrissey tells us that ‘[p]oetry is the mind making music/with a few blunt instruments’, a handy ars poetica against which readers might measure the success or otherwise of Memory Gene Pool.
Indeed, what happens when those ‘blunt instruments’ are out-of-tune? I hope I’m not alone in recoiling from the confessional — often emetic — prerogative in poetry. To me, perhaps due to my knowing of Morrissey’s travails as detailed in his Taming the Tiger, the words on the page seem, often, as scars on flesh. “Atrocity”, for instance, strikes an overtly Plathian pose, one which I find poetically impeachable in too many of her poems, as I do in Morrissey’s. In ‘Inappropriate Just for Once: ‘my mother-in-law came down the steps/checking for the money I had left like small/flat purple mice.’ This, plainly, is odd, and it is so amongst many oddities. In the same key, pathetic fallacies are strikingly numerous: banknotes ‘chuckle’; the ‘sea forgets its name’ and chews at a man’s past; grass is ‘anxious to please’; tomorrow ‘has no truck with death’; and so on. Since neither banknotes nor the sea nor grass nor tomorrow do any of these things, are these instances of ‘the mind making music’?
Whatever one’s answer to that question may be, compare
Theodora serenissima vestaratrix
and mother Marpzia
became Patricia of Rome
both mother and lascivious daughter
jointly denounced by Gibbon
as the rule of the Harlots.
Lituprand of Cremona
dubbed Marozonia a shameless whore
who married Guy of Tuscany,
arrested John X in the Lateran,
jailed him in the Castel Sant’ Angelo,
smothered him with a pillow…
to
condemn consciousness
as a digestion of blood
a figment born of
the power to imagine
give me soul
I’ll chuck you
a butcher’s
prime cut
The former, from the unfortunately-titled ‘Pornocracy’, both has intrinsic value and sets me well on the way to fascination, and I thank Morrissey for it; the latter, from the aptly named ‘Between the Ears’, does nothing for anyone and leaves me longing for more of something else.
When, in ‘Small Hours Take Longer to Pass’, Morrissey states ‘I am not inclined to metaphor at 3 am’, I am inclined to wonder if that’s the only time at which it’s true. But if 3 am is when Morrissey reads and wonders and writes of the ‘spicy relish’ ‘cooked up’ by a ‘nadir of the papacy’, as in ‘Pornocracy’ I wish him 3am more often, and us more opportunities to read what Morrissey might make of them.
ROBERT MCLEAN was born at Bethany in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1974. His most recent publication is a chapbook length poem A Graveyard by the Sea (Cold Hub Press). He lives in Lyttelton, Banks Peninsula.
Nice to be reviewed (I guess). To get a fuller picture of my poetry than what’s been provided by Robert you can go to my webpage: http://vaughangunsonpoetry.com or read these reviews by Siobhan Harvey http://beattiesbookblog.blogspot.co.nz/2013/06/nz-poetry-reviewed-by-siobhan-harvey.html and Nadine France http://nzbooks.org.nz/2013/literature/unbuttoning-nadine-france/