Genevieve Scanlan
Tell Me Gently by Ruth Arnison (Ruth Arnison, 2023), 26pp, $14.99; When I Reach For Your Pulse by Rushi Vyas (Otago University Press, 2023), 110pp, $29.99; A Liminal Gathering: Elixir & Star grief almanac 2023 edited by Iona Winter (Elixir & Star Press, 2023), 188pp, $32.99.
To pick up Ruth Arnison’s Tell Me Gently is to hold a labour of love in your hands. But the nature of that love, and just what it is freighted with, is not immediately obvious. Not from the delicate pastel watercolour of the cover design, nor even by the end of the first few poems. Initially, the collection moves through the expected stages of a very ordinary kind of happiness. A couple is shown expectant in ‘Pregnant in Portobello’: ‘We are daffodil delighted. / A Spring baby.’ There are the manageable inconveniences of rustic rural living until they move back into town. Then their baby girl comes—not easily—and ‘there is such joy’ as the new parents ‘ring NZ family, wake UK friends’.
And then, the story turns into—as per the title of one poem—‘a nightmare no awakening can soften’. We are told: ‘The geneticist talks of chromosomes. / The cardiologist’s sentences are full of holes.’ A doctor, quite callously, confirms the worst: ‘With clear, cutting clinical precision, he says / Not compatible with life.’
As the trajectory of baby Jenny’s story becomes clear, the watercolour illustrations around the verses take on another layer of resonance, for this reviewer at least. How often, in waiting rooms and hospital corridors, do we find some slight comfort in a watercolour painting of a nature scene?
These poems are often sparse and spare, as plain in their use of language as they are in their honesty. This makes the facts feel all the more devastating: ‘Her nursery is waiting; her toys are play ready.’ ‘We make phone calls, crucifying joy.’ Deftly and economically, Arnison cuts to the quick. There are metaphors here that will resonate with anyone who has experienced grief. Especially this line: ‘We are jetlagged. / We have journeyed outside / a world we understand.’
Arnison also perfectly captures the emotional labour that the bereaved end up doing, comforting and reassuring their own ‘Hospital visitors’. ‘We console them, say yes we are ok, … / yes, yes, and still they stay. / … filling gaps with everyday out-there- / in-the-real-world life matters. / This is our real world.’ Everyone’s good intentions notwithstanding, there is inevitable awkwardness and pain: ‘A friend calls by to visit with her baby daughter. / Daughter, a word we no longer own.’
Jenny is brought home for the few precious days that remain to them. Her parents ‘scatter toys around the lounge because / that’s what it’s like with a baby in the house.’ Each detail Arnison offers up feels more devastating than the last. After their daughter’s death has been registered, and they’ve shouted her name from windy clifftops, all that remains for her parents is to ‘turn homewards / to our freshly decorated / emptiness.’
Arnison is the editor of the Poems in the Waiting Room series, which puts poems into hospital rooms and GP’s offices around the country. She knows as well as anyone the solace that poetry can provide. In Tell Me Gently, she has offered another gift—to little Jenny Laura, to whom the book is dedicated—and also to readers, who will doubtless find some familiar part of their own grief, and their own fierce love, reflected in its pages.
When I Reach For Your Pulse is the debut from Rushi Vyas. It is a visceral and vulnerable collection that was longlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in the 2024 Ockham Awards. The first poem’s very first lines set an unflinching tone, preparing the reader for what is to come: ‘I waited all my life for my father / to die and when he finally did I heard / the whip of voices caged within / his skull.’
The titular pulse is that of the author’s father, who died by suicide. Several poems portray the moment Vyas found his father hanging, that present violence recalling other violences in the past: ‘your body thuds onto the floor / below the sheriff’s blade— / I feel each pound / of your feet descending our stairs in rage / Fingers sink into the cool tissue of mother’s arm.’
These poems describe an embattled, ambivalent father-son relationship—and that ambivalence in fact feels generous, an act of grace. Whatever else this father was, to his son he remains ‘Bapu’. Excuses are not made in the least, but context is given. In ‘Suicide note in absentia, Part 1’, Bapu’s own voice relates the series of struggles that spawned those ‘voices caged within / his skull’. A demanding Brahmin mother who ‘smacked my spine with a broomstick each time my eyes wandered from the textbook’; white colleagues who took advantage of his work ethic and let him work himself ill. Another poem flatly states, ‘The man who earned the money Mom used to raise me / owned a gold Rolex.’ A surgeon and an immigrant conscious of status, Vyas’ father believed that this class signifier ‘earned the respect / of Catholics and Jews, potential patients, clients.’
Though prideful and quick to anger, this father is also a somewhat pathetic figure. When his children are grown and his wife eventually leaves him, he is powerless. It is implied that this is one result of patriarchal culture:
M says ‘The Uncles in our community are helpless’
in your last months all you could say: ‘You must get her back’
despair for an Uncle: when he must occupy the kitchen
relearn how to use the skillet load the dishwasher
and sleep alone under the appliance hum.
When I Reach For Your Pulse is densely packed with cultural references, many of which this reviewer no doubt failed to fully comprehend. The detail and specificity in this collection make it a keenly drawn portrait of a particular family. But even for those readers not acquainted with Brahmin tradition—or life in the United States—the dynamics, dysfunctions and tensions beneath these specifics are vivid and recognisable. The poet and his father are in opposition, not just within the family but also ideologically, in the realm of politics. In one poem, Vyas gives us a:
Portrait of Bapu and Son as Investment Account Tied Up in Probate
If you are packaged in a bundle I will not notice
the oil spill you fund the murder of Sioux people you
bankroll.
For all this—for all the very real damage done within many an outwardly respectable family unit—no single view of a person can ever be a complete one. And Vyas does not allow himself, nor his readers, to forget that. In ‘Remembrance’, a friend of the family shares his own, very different memories of the departed:
your dad saved my life three times
the man speaks of a man
you never fully knew …
you’re jealous
of his tears his hued huff he squeezes
your back too hard says he was a great man … you mutter
thank you you repeat thank you
A Liminal Gathering is the inaugural publication from Elixir & Star Press, and the first iteration of their biennial Grief Almanac. It could hardly have been given a more appropriate title. This book gathers together the works of more than a hundred Aotearoa-based artists, all centred around personal experiences of grief. As such, there are threads of commonality running through A Liminal Gathering, but there is also great diversity—in style, in the specifics of subject matter, and in range of form. (This includes poetry, prose, visual art and photography.) In compiling so many widely ranging works, this collection crystallises the universality of grief, and the incredibly personal specificity of it, at the same time.
The Elixir & Star Grief Almanac was conceived and edited by Iona Winter. Her foreword describes the project’s genesis, in the wake of the death of her son Reuben. Founding the press and compiling this collection seems to have been a calling for Winter and an act of generosity: she is working to fill a gap in the available literature on grief.
A Liminal Gathering is generous in size and scope, as well as in intention. Its 100-plus works contain such variety that every reader will find something that resonates with them. (I should point out that both Ruth Arnison and Rushi Vyas have also contributed to this collection.)
In prose, Hannah Rae expresses reasonable doubt: ‘The standard advice to grievers is that “whatever you’re feeling is normal”. Whenever I heard that I thought, Are you sure? What does that really mean? It’s pretty horrific in here.’
In the stunning poem ‘Stay Here’, Majella Cullinane evokes the destabilising effect of loss:
Could I tell you …
how I opened the bathroom window
even though I had the front door keys?
I’ve stopped trusting in the simple function of things.
Idoya Munn pierces through the façade of comforting cultural narratives: ‘we make such import of autonomy and personal agency as if we make our lives but we don’t our lives make us and I am being made.’
Anuja Mitra decides, at great cost, ‘I’ll love everything that leaves / and call it living.’
And Rushi Vyas is gentle but frank in his address to the ‘Dear Reader’: ‘go outside. Feel everything. The wind is cruel. And full of oxygen. The sun is deadly radiation. And our only source of warmth.’
These were only some of the lines that struck me personally on my first read. Other excerpts might resonate more during a different week, a different season, a different stage of life. That is the nature of grief, and that makes this collection all the more precious and practical a gift. A Liminal Gathering will be there, waiting for us when we need it, as I hope will many further editions of the Elixir & Star Grief Almanac.
An almanac is, by nature, a very practical publication. It is a handbook for navigating the changing seasons—for working with what we are given, however uncomfortable or unbearable the conditions may seem. Titling this collection as such was very intentional on Winter’s part, and to me it feels not so much a beautiful metaphor as an honest truth. While the ‘practical value’ of poetry and the arts are continually questioned in the public sphere, in times of grief and uncertainty human beings reach again and again for what they offer. By calling this book an almanac, Winter is making more obvious what we should already know: that other people’s expressions and transmutations of their own private grief are the best guides and charts we have for surviving our own.
GENEVIEVE SCANLAN lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. She has reviewed poetry for Landfall, HAMSTER magazine and The Rochford Street Review, and has had her own work published in the Otago Daily Times, The Rise Up Review and Poetry New Zealand.
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