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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Old Ways and New Directions

October 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Erik Kennedy

Shape of the Heart by Kevin Ireland (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2020), 64pp., $24.99; This Is Your Real Name by Elizabeth Morton (Otago University Press, 2020), 72pp., $27.50; The Wanderer by Ron Riddell (HeadworX, 2020), 84pp., $25

It shouldn’t be surprising that a book of poems dedicated to a cohort of fellow octogenarian writers (including Maurice Gee, Vincent O’Sullivan and C.K. Stead) should muse on the ageing process—its frustrations, indignities and lessons. And if the poet is Kevin Ireland, it shouldn’t be a surprise that many of those poems are crackers. Ireland has written good poems about ageing since before he could claim to be old; I’m thinking of, for example, ‘An old man on Capri’, from 1990’s Tiberius at the Beehive: 

There is nothing that amuses me more,

so far from the Forum, in my decline,

than to torture the politicians

 

with the prospect of my return.

This sort of wry defiance is on occasional display in Shape of the Heart, too. Take ‘Odd man out’, which opens with:

Ask any actuary

and he or she

will tell you that

the longer you exist

on earth the more your life

is likely to continue. The maths

at first seemed mad to me

and yet they work.

This vision of an indestructible tough old bugger, as surprised as anyone to still be existing, brings to mind the late work of Clive James, who similarly found a lot of time to consider the subject. But I don’t want to give the impression that the poems of Shape of the Heart are all bluff and well-girded by irony. Aloneness and fragility and pain are given in regular doses, like the morning’s meds. A poem about walking around the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford with Fleur Adcock is a catalogue of dazzled, strained eyes, munted knees and the desire to recline and ‘let the blood drain // back into my skull’. The limited horizons of the ageing poet are indicated by the presence of multiple poems about the day’s weather, which is the sort of thing you’re more likely to write about if you’re not going anywhere. Decreased powers of recollection and concentration are assessed, and Ireland tries to make the best of the situation, even coming up with an advert-worthy tagline for a failing memory: it’s ‘the natural way to help you unclog your head’.

At risk in the middle of all this slow breaking-down is the ability to create poetry. But, to be fair, poets of every age are afraid of losing their gifts, and Ireland realises this. Artistic failure comes to everyone in the end, and stubbornly sticking to an art in the face of setbacks is what Ireland refers to as ‘the cost of calamity’: 

Art activates obsession and depression

and even though a little accolade

may bring relief or provide a total cure

one failure always leads on to another.

Disaster’s cost is absolute commitment. 

In this way, writing and ageing—this book’s two most obvious themes—aren’t so different. Both are attempts to keep failure at bay, and both require single-minded concentration:

Age is like a mountain. The angles alter on the way

and sometimes all you come across up there is fog.

You find you’re wheezing and unsteady, but craftily

you learn to blame the iciness of the peaks.

…

It’s a frantic effort merely to exist—and there’s not

a single second to reflect on fear of heights, or death.

And both efforts, of course, are half-measures, tidal barriers against unstoppably rising waters.

The poems of Elizabeth Morton’s second collection, This Is Your Real Name, are more fractured and evasive than those in 2017’s Wolf. The debut featured a strong central sequence of lyrics about the character Wolf, describing him killing and doing other wolfish things, and many of the other poems in the book could reasonably be described as ‘raw’. Here, on the other hand, we have language stretched out like elasticated denim, paratactic sentences, an increased reliance on surreal phrases. It’s an imperfect analogy, but it’s a bit like if the Clash had gone from the self-titled straight to Sandinista! 

There are dreamlike sequences, such as in the poem ‘The eating of sorrow’—which works pretty well, I think, though it’s not easy to explain how: 

There were days I spent gulping sky,

picking every star off the plate

with the stub of a thumb.

There were days when birds

would slide down my windpipe

and I would splutter little heartbeats,

wipe my mouth with the corner of a cloud.

There are holes in my eyes.

…

… There were days

I would not stand in corners,

days where sparrows would perch

in my tear ducts and rain-pellets

would tickle my windshield of pain.

There are holes in my eyes.

This is what I call a high evocation-to-elucidation ratio; the language suggests faster than it can conclude. The result is poetry that ramifies outward. There are enough connections for you to feel you know what sort of effect is being created, but not enough to pin it down. And I have cut out of this the bits that reference Achelois (a minor Greek moon goddess whose name means ‘she who drives away pain’, a clear nod to the title of the poem) and Kokytos (a river in the Greek underworld). If you think there’s a lot going on here, you’re right.

But there are also poems in This Is Your Real Name that draw on more easily recognisable scenes of life. This is ‘I shed kilos reading Cioran in the mall’ in its entirety:

Sometimes I go hunting

for oxytocin

in Sylvia Park,

like our love

is empty calories,

like Karen Carpenter

is our spirit animal,

like me plus you

makes something

less than a zero,

like sometimes I go

buying sentiment

that hangs

with bling lanyards

and bangles,

or the window dresser’s

mannequins

who carry small hope

in the napes

of their neck stumps.

Sometimes I go

roleplaying sweet nothings

to the cashier

in the carpark building

and mostly I am scared

of falling for something

complicated like

mechanical barrier arms

that crush whole

torsos and spit out feet

and collarbones.

And sometimes I go

listening to customers

yabbering

about refunds and

hire purchases

and it just rubs in

the fact that

I am not

financially literate

like I can’t even count

in twos or add up

blessings

on one hand.

How could you not like this poem? It’s almost jolly in the way it handles anxiety, consumerism, eating disorders and love—and it’s all stimulated, apparently, by the writing of one of the most miserable men of the twentieth century, the Romanian nihilist philosopher and erstwhile fascist Emil Cioran. 

To cap it all off, there are poems that engage with contemporary politics: a poem that is probably about Syria (‘Counterstrike’), an elegy for Grenfell (‘Sonnet for a towerblock’), and a critique of the US that almost strays into paint-by-numbers territory but just avoids it (‘We ordered Big Macs and napalm. We downloaded the world / from our couches, exploded villages from our apartment suites, / watched body counts split into a solitary pie chart’). Elizabeth Morton is a poet who is striking out in a new direction.

Another poet one might expect to strike out in a new direction is Ron Riddell. His latest effort is a book-length poem whose title seems to promise peregrination: The Wanderer. This is in fact book one of a planned multi-volume work that is ‘a poetic attempt to make sense of time “in exile,” to give coherence to the disparate and the seemingly random in the persona of the traveller’, as Riddell says in an author’s note. The second volume, we’re told, will involve physical journeying along the famous pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia; this book’s journey is of a more interior nature. 

The Wanderer is organised into seven sections, mostly named for places in Colombia, where Riddell usually resides. (The exception is the ‘Coatesville’ section.) These stamping grounds may be familiar to readers who have followed Riddell’s work since the publication of El Milagro de Medellín (2002) and especially Spirit Songs (2004), two books that marked a shift in his poetics. 

There is a circularity to this poem’s wandering; spiritual self-knowledge matters more than destination-oriented thinking. We are very much in the territory of T.S. Eliot’s ‘In my beginning is my end’ and ‘the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time’ in Four Quartets. (I actually wrote in my copy of The Wanderer, as a joke, ‘This could be called More Quartets.’) This is not an idle comparison. In the opening two sections we get lines like:

In my beginning is my breath

the breath-upon-the-water

 

the breath in every step

the step in every breath:

 

in my end is no end but

zen and no-zen; art and art-less-ness …

And: 

In my end there is no end:

 

acting out of the back streets

from the dim recesses of memory

 

I bring significant facts to light

I tease them out with patience

The absence of a clear narrative impulse in a fifty-eight-page poem means that much of the work’s variety comes from sound. Here Riddell is on sure footing, as he has always been a capable user of slant rhyme and both obvious and subtle meters. A good moment comes near the end of poem, when a metaphorical (and possibly actual) peak is being reached:

We’re getting near the mountain top

getting near; not giving up

getting near and reaching out.

With startled cry, with joyous shout

we spy the summit looming up:

huge boulders, crags, one last ridge

that would defy us, knock us out

break our crampons, boots and picks

 

wipe out our steps

There is a surging energy at work here, a can-do vigour that I feel is very much not present in much page poetry of today, and that counts for something. 

We have the chance

and need to take it

knowing what we do

and what we don’t:

 

the assassin waiting round the bend

the motorcycle matador

poised to strike

 

as the earth moves in silence

the sun in stillness

the planets, moon and stars

in concert.

 

How can the human voice

make a difference?


ERIK KENNEDY is the author of There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (Victoria University Press, 2018), and he is co-editing a book of climate change poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific, forthcoming from Auckland University Press in 2021. His poems and criticism have recently been published in places like FENCE, The Moth, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Sport and the TLS. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Christchurch.

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