Landfall Review Online

Worm in the Apple

June 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Robert McLean
The stunning debut of the repairing of a life, by Leigh Davis (Otago University Press, 2010), 216 pp., $39.95

Our stock of available reality not only has been more or less stopped being added to, it is rapidly shrinking, and what remains of it also is becoming costlier. The stunning debut of the repairing of a life by the late Leigh Davis is one of those increasingly rare books that not only dares to but succeeds in augmenting our stuff of life. It is a humbly ambitious work of wide scope and deep integrity. If, as Wittgenstein suggested, the ethical is fundamentally a question of an individual’s attitude when regarding the world-as-it-is, Davis’s book is quietly powerful enough to prompt the reader to question perspectives informing their own normative outlook. And it is in this regard that Davis’s The stunning debut can be considered the finest long poem published by a New Zealander since Smithyman’s Atua Wera.

It gets under way with a proem in which Davis provides a statement of intent: ‘I want contemporary forms, that is, to do something new. /I don’t want novelty but archaic ingenuity.’ This amounts to an honorific idea of poetry – or at least of what it ought to be: a desire for poems that are, amongst other ends, self-evaluative of an imagined life. It is a project that is greatly distanced from the young Leigh Davis’s iconoclasm, the provocative brio that informed him when he founded the journal And and the Jack Books imprint and through it issued his first book Willy’s Gazette. Wystan Curnow, whose own Cancer Daybook came to mind when I was reading The stunning debut, reports Davis felt that it seemed ‘increasingly clear that the old world—medieval, or more strictly post-Classical, thought—supplies major aspects of visual art’s contemporary meaning,’ to which Curnow appends the comment that Davis’s view applied ‘not just visual art either. If there was one idea that separated the later writings from the earlier, that was it’ (Journal of New Zealand Literature, Spring 2010).

As a student of modernism – of Pound and Joyce and Williams and so on – that Davis would arrive at such a view is hardly surprising. His redemptive archaeologies are tempered with scepticism derived from the American Language poets and post-structuralist theory, but similar doubt is evident in certain totems of the Pound era, as in, for instance, Dante, even at his most beatific: ‘How weak are words, and how unfit to frame/My concept…/Eternal light’ (Paradiso, Canto XXXIII). In Davis’s words, it is ‘(d)yslexia, or that trouble, again: original meaning arriving with more pressure or insistence through confusion in the signs’ (‘Bearing Witness’ – Davis on Stephen Bambury’s Siena Paintings, February 2001): the bewildered and complainant body, seen for its telling humours and perennial dislocations, is the vessel and terrain for the journey back, the voyage home. Language is crafted into a vessel with which to sail a katabasis to the sea of death. Davis’s usages of synecdoche, both pars pro toto and totum pro parte, make this subject and its object seem as boundless and unknowable as constantly-shifting seascapes and language themselves.

The section of the book following the proem consists of facsimiles of a notebook kept by Davis during his recuperation after serious brain surgery. A specialist of brain trauma or a student of linguistics would be more likely to offer worthwhile assessments of these than I can do, for whom they offer little more than curiosities of biographical circumstance. But insofar as modernism’s ‘etherised patient’ is remade and re-rendered as nonfigurative by medical realities, these higgledy-piggledy notations, gradually moving towards coherence and informed acceptance, provide evidence of the sad worldliness and trauma from which repairing of a life was made. Think of the serious illness John Donne suffered in 1623, which produced similar concerns: in ‘Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness’ the poet considers his destination as if he himself is a vessel that may reach the desirable places of this world and other, but only by negotiating some painful straits. His conceit seeks to catch the working of providence itself, which shapes human accidents in patterns of timeless truth. More recently, C.K. Stead’s collection, The Black River (i.e. the river Styx), was written after a stroke had left its author dyslexic for a time. Crested on life’s whelming finitude, many of the poems seem to project a desire to look back, to take stock, and, not unusually for Stead, to settle accounts and scores. The modernists’ anaesthetised bodies – deranged or sick selves and society – provide Davis with a means and a tradition with and in which to operate.

Yet, in contrast with Stead, it appears Davis had a rather more conciliatory purpose. I: Know God (Soft Structure), the book’s first section after the notebook reproductions, consists of a gentle Lucretian meditative sequence, a De rerum natura, which is characterised by supple and patient movements of mind, both in and through language, and in and through life. It resists paraphrase and necessitates a lightness of touch in response. Refuge and integrity are found in luminal abstractions and focused particulars. The language is open to the world and graceful in contending with it. Although it often skirts near to sentimentality, it never quite tips over into it; given such propriety, it is free of the standardised post-Language school diction, one that has rapidly become homogenised far beyond cliché, both saccharine and mouldy, that one often encounters when reading ‘experimental’ writing. Words are refreshed by the poet’s precision and lack of assumption, as is the world from which words ultimately derive.

The final sequence refocuses Davis’s poetry outwards and down into Odyssean actualities. The myth kitty, given its lack of bite and myriad of infections, is generally shooed off, and usually this is for the best. And although the culminating section seemed less fulfilled and more contingent than the preceding sequence, nonetheless, though only after several revisitings, its correlative significance clarified and became resonant. Far from the first time, Homer’s wilily luckless persistent navigator is called on to provide directions, to demonstrate proper conduct, and to translate the inscrutable terms of providence. In no way is this novel; rather, it is original, like reading your father’s or grandfather’s diary.

This review warrants an apology – albeit one that is soundly qualified. I have made few quotes from the text, and possibly not offered enough of the expected sense of ‘what it’s like.’ Indeed, I have made more from other sources than the book at hand. And yet I haven’t been able to resist this turn. Davis’s is an old book, almost old beyond words: it is filled with echoes; perhaps it contains nothing but echoes. And my reading of it has been ghosted by many voices. While I have been writing my response to Stunning debut, I have felt like I imagine it would feel to review, say, The Book of Job, Grimm’s Fairytales, or Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. These are bottomless texts. They are texts about which one could write an endless amount of different readings. And there have been many re-readings and many rewritings. Deadlines have come and gone. In the end, to borrow Wittgenstein’s words, let it be said that ‘this book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it – or similar thoughts’, which, in my view, is every reader, if they are prepared to admit it. It is a book to be read – nothing else will prove sufficient.

John Newton made a provocative point when, prefacing his reading at the Home And Away trans-Tasman poetry symposium, he suggested that contemporary poets haven’t yet moved any substantial distance from the norms of Romanticism; feelings, he says, remain our poetic raison d’être. But if finding themselves under sufficient pressure or urgency, poets may find other older ways to write here and now. ‘What is most modern in our time,’ according to Guy Davenport, ‘frequently turns out to be the most archaic’ and ‘(t)he heart of the modern taste for the archaic is precisely the opposite of the Romantic feeling for ruins’ (The Geography of the Imagination, pp. 21–22): this is a perspective for which Davis has provided a timely instance. Sentimentality or swoons are not allowable when undertaking a Homeric Nekyia: Leigh Davis’s posthumous katabasis is a demonstration of both these truths: an unblinking steady-handed going down towards open water. The repairing of a life is a measured and moving retelling of a perennial story.

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ROBERT MCLEAN was born at Bethany in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1974. His poems, translations and reviews have been published in a variety of periodicals and anthologies both locally and overseas. His first collection, For the Coalition Dead, was published by Kilmog Press in 2009; For Renato Curcio (Gumtree Press) followed in 2010.

The Lightness of Being Bill Culbert

June 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

David Eggleton
Bill Culbert: Making Light Work, by Ian Wedde (Auckland University Press, hardback, illustrated, 272 pp., $99.99.

Have lightbulb, will travel. Sculptor Bill Culbert embodies the expatriate artist condition. He left New Zealand in 1957 at the age of 21 to attend the Royal College of Art in London and has lived overseas ever since. However, after he first returned to these islands from Europe in 1978 to take up a short term artist-in-residency at the University of Canterbury, he has been to-ing and fro-ing between northern and southern hemispheres on a regular basis. And, as Ian Wedde tells us in Bill Culbert: Making Light Work, Culbert ‘travels light’ — often, apart from a carry-on bag, his sole piece of luggage is a hard-shell Samsonite suitcase ‘containing fluorescent tubes . . . or hard-to-find fixtures and bulbs.’ It’s a hold-all for odds and ends that might be useful for helping set up an artwork or an installation that involves lighting.

But there’s lighting and there’s lighting. Bill Culbert is a lighting specialist of another order. He uses light in all its manifestations — ‘light-marks in space, light-in-light, light in darkness, night light, daylight’ as a kind of substance, something to sculpt with, something to paint with. As Ian Wedde observes, light enables Culbert to ‘brush’ objects and atmospheres into a state of aesthetic clarity. The way this artist salvages ordinary light playing over ordinary things, and brings it to our attention; and his devotion to light’s radiance, its immanence, seems almost priestly, like that of some old-time Platonist philosopher who sought to show the world is really crystal, a sphere through which light shines.

Wedde’s thorough-going treatment unpacks, as it were, Culbert’s battered suitcase of ‘barely revealed’ presentations and perceptions, and through a series of nuanced analyses gives a sense of the multitude of fine discriminations involved in creating any given Culbert piece, whether created by the artist alone or in collaboration. Profusely illustrated, handsomely presented, and including an extensive bibliography, this monograph is the first major study of Bill Culbert’s oeuvre. Prior to its publication, the full extent of Culbert’s range and diversity of projects hadn’t been obvious in this country. The narrative aligns him with the expatriate careers of Frances Hodgkins and Len Lye, and also serves to reveal just how highly regarded he is elsewhere, and just how much critical response he has generated, particularly in France, but also in the UK and Germany.

One aspect Wedde stresses is Culbert’s methodology as a product of cultural exchange. In creating, or curating, this interplay of Culbert as the epitome of the well-travelled international Modernist, yet also quintessentially Kiwi in his understated, studiously casual approach, Wedde begins at the beginning, covering Culbert’s early years (a 1930s childhood in Port Chalmers, exposure to post-War progressive art education at Hutt Valley High School, an honours degree in painting from Canterbury University’s Art School) in order to give us a sure sense of the artist’s formative factors as the maker of a particular kind of artwork.

At heart, Culbert is a conceptualist, and his conceptual rigour manifests itself in his ongoing economy of means with its paradoxical richness of reference — hence his admirable adaptability and exemplary energy. Raiding rubbish dumps for discarded plastic containers, bottles, and other faded, semi-invisible objects, he injects them with light, and thus illuminated they become beautiful objects for contemplation. Yet if Culbert appears dedicated to resurrecting the simple, the humble, and commemorating the once-functional, he’s also playful with it, a subscriber to the ‘industrial optimism’ of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, along with the subversiveness of other early Modernist artists, such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and, latterly, Jean Tinguely.

Since 1961 Bill Culbert and family have been based in the Vaucluse region of Provence in the south of France, and, enlivening the French connection with the help of the tramp-like suitcase Culbert lugs hither and yon, Wedde shows how the spirit of Kiwi ingenuity finds a parallel in French peasant resourcefulness, so that Culbert’s perceptiveness is able to link the two. So, for example, when he came back to Christchurch in 1978, he travelled over to the West Coast and the rural vernacular architecture — the left-over frontier mentality — he discovered there provided validation for the repurposed found objects he was working with in Europe.

Wedde chronicles, too, the metamorphosis from ‘William Culbert’, the art school student of the 1950s who painted portraits and still-lifes employing the framework of Cubism, to the ‘Bill Culbert’ of the 1960s, eye-witness to Arte Povera, Op Art and the general mood of Sixties experimentation, who had begun to rethink the presentation of the properties of surface, colour, light. Working with a camera and making ‘photo-works’ presented a way of getting beyond painting’s ‘edge limitation’, while light, which ‘filled space and went through holes’ offered something to work with. Culbert became someone who cultivated light like a primary producer, making it sprout out of sculptural devices, and harvesting its reflections and projections.

And beyond stark formalism, the ‘bare bones’ of fluorescent tube or lightbulb, Culbert sought to make an art that included interaction with people, either individually as they approached, circled or were enveloped by light-making devices, or collectively as they grasped the idea of a ‘convivial space’, a congenial and relaxed environment in which they ‘shared’ the vignette of the artwork or installation. To an extent this seems like wishful utopianism on the part of both the artist and his explicator, as actually art of this kind is something of a closed shop, a narrow regard, a rite of initiation.

Wedde, though, also discourses on his own relationship with and connection to the artist, and his anecdotes of their interactions do perhaps stand in for the eloquent silences Culbert’s works in situ essentially offer. Elaborating on the lightness of being Bill Culbert, Wedde describes his experience of working as a facilitator on the Ralph Hotere–Bill Culbert collaborative piece ‘Void’ (2006) — essentially just two black flat rubber discs, one on the floor, one on the ceiling — permanently installed at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and providing an object lesson in the art of paradox from two masters of the less-is-more school: ‘through the brash busy core of the building a shaft of emptiness has been installed’, but rather than being an emblem of negative space this shaft is a site of optimism, an exhilarating centre. Amidst the business of its making Wedde drafted a publicity document suggesting that this artwork ‘reached heavenward’; Culbert demurred suggesting it did not, rather it reached ‘up’. His artworks, he was saying, are not intended to be ‘literary’ or ‘metaphorical’ or even ‘symbolic’; they simply are what they are: simple and honest perceptions of the physical properties of matter, and that clear-sighted minimalism is magic enough.

The cover of the book shows a photo-work of what has become, in a number of variants, a classic Culbert image. Sunlight shines through a bistro glass of red wine, and the literal shadow it makes forms the outline of an electric lightbulb. It is a moment of stopped time, a heliograph, the light of the sun caught as the earth revolves.

DAVID EGGLETON is the editor of Landfall and Landfall Review Online.

World Turned Upside Down

June 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Mia Watkins
Wulf, by Hamish Clayton (Penguin NZ, 2011), 240 pp., $30.00

Time escapes Wulf, leaps and bounds and bubbles and weaves between the words on the pages. This is no armchair narrative, you don’t get to cosy-up in a warm blanket sipping hot chocolate, a semi-conscious passive recipient of a predictable, orderly narrative. Thinking is compulsory. Even little knowledge of New Zealand history is a passport to thrive on Wulf and if you don’t know, here’s a fine way to enter the conversation. Wulf rewards the diligent reader. Dive into the ancient, imagine a time before time, the origin of time, words heavy-laden with ancestors treading deep into the infinite as you read.

Te Rauparaha — the ‘Great Wolf’, ‘Southern Napoleon’, monster-demon, warlord, magician, cannibal-poet, ruthless, cunning and mightiest of New Zealand chiefs — permeates the narrative like the underside of a long cloud foreshadowing history. Traversing the landscape barefoot he glances behind, spies blood on a stick broken underfoot; the land is bleeding (his foot is bleeding) but the land is bleeding; flesh is land, people are land. If you haven’t forayed very far into the Maori world, be prepared to turn everything you thought you knew upside down. New Zealand is, after all, geographically upside-down to England; a fitting image for a meeting of worlds. The Southern Cross is an anchor, gold is green, geographical drawings are portraits of faces staring back at you, trees root deep into a sky beneath sky and history is prophesied. Language doesn’t reside in ink on paper but lives on faces and dances in caves, riverbeds and markings in the sand; a vocabulary of the natural world in which Te Rauparaha is highly educated.

Cowell, trading master of the brig Elizabeth, bridges the impasse of mirror opposites. He’s been to New Zealand before, traded and spoken the native tongue. The crew ponder his true allegiance while listening awestruck to his tales of mighty chiefs, shrunken heads, giant eagles, alliances and betrayals, peace-time, slavery, infanticide and creation-myth and legend. Tribes fade in and out of existence like twinkling stars puncturing the black void of night, shifting in the kaleidoscope. Earthquakes shift land too, creating deep ravines, echoless pits and mountainous ranges. Details are bloody, gruesome and cruel; corpses adorn the landscape — draped from trees, littering waterways. A young boy is killed with a single snap of the neck, a young woman is ensnared to her death, tracked, butchered and cannibalised. The carnage is savage and not for the faint-hearted; and yet equally these constellations of circumstance are breathtaking, dizzying, wondrous.

Wulf is also deeply paranoid, and so it should be, it’s historical fiction. History is subjective and often as enigmatic as the Old English poem ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’ that inspires the novel. Who tells the story and how do you know who they are? History is a fanfare of voices heard and unheard, stories told and untold, morphed, altered and contentious, a cornucopia of image, sound and flesh. This is refracted throughout the novel. The crew aboard the Elizabeth politely eye-ball each other, pry into corners of privacy, discover themselves there and become more paranoid. True intentions and identities are suspect. For these illiterates in an alien land, the inability to decipher a layout of shells on a beach, a fire on Kapiti Island or sounds of breaking sticks is unnerving, as is the inevitable default to familiar frames of reference. Is a surreptitiously placed basket of fish a gift of food or a trap? Even alone in nature they feel watched, tracked, spied upon, entered by unseen spirits. All eye all askance. Te Rauparaha observes from land, Cowell and crew from sea, each astutely aware of each other’s presence, in dreams and in waking. Omens, visions and premonitions trip over themselves, watching, waiting nervously for their respective fates to collide.

In refusing to name his narrator, Hamish Clayton supersedes the perennial problem of pleasing history (without losing authenticity) and teases, taunts even his reader and critics by denying disembarkation. It’s your story too, you don’t get out that easily, not without a deep look in the mirror. Nameless narration causes you to recognise a little of yourself in the fabric of the story. As the novel unravels, Cowell’s charm fades as he is seen for what he really is; the bridge retreats and mirror opposites start to look the same. These tacticians begin to reflect the inconsolable truth of each skilfully playing the other at his own blood-soaked game, each a Trojan horse destroying the other from within, and yet much more like the other than they dare to think or even realise.

Authorship must be more than the clever arrangement of words on a page. Words breathe when they command attention, when complicity is mandatory; otherwise they fall away like dead cells. Clayton achieves this in Wulf, a haunting, powerful evocation of a book I loved and clung to, even as it sank me under an ocean of tears.

MIA WATKINS is a Dunedin-based writer most recently published in Landfall and The International Literary Quarterly. She is inspired by a simple love of reading and writing.

Worlds Within

June 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Jamie Hanton
A Micronaut in the Wide World: the Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy, by Gregory O’Brien, (Auckland University Press, 2011), 182 pp., $59.99.

Back and Beyond: New Zealand Painting for the Young and Curious, by Gregory O’Brien, (Auckland University Press, 2008), 104 pp., $34.99

Imagination, and all its mighty power, is at the centre of both of these recent Gregory O’Brien publications. It is no coincidence that both titles have the eyes and minds of children at their core, yet in both cases O’Brien’s writing elevates imagination beyond its usual youthful collocation. Back and Beyond is written, as the title suggests, for more innocent art readers, while Micronaut is a biography of New Zealand expatriate artist and children’s illustrator Graham Percy.

The challenges inherent in writing art books for children are manifold. It’s easy to patronise, and just as easy to aim too low and miss anything worth saying. O’Brien addresses this problem in both the structure and style of Back and Beyond. Using the first person, O’Brien adopts a considered conversational tone to describe many of the paintings. While shunned in some circles, there is something to be said for the well-timed invocation of the personal in art historical discourse. If gallery wall texts were written from the point of view of an individual and situated as but one voice in a multitude of voices there would necessarily be more room for disagreement and for the initiation of conversations so vital in any pedagogic scenario.

Similarly, by presenting a collection of painters’ profiles and selected works under loosely thematic titles, each of which takes up two pages, Back and Beyond remains open for narrative interpretation. The focus on individual painters operating within particular social and historical contexts presents a personal, and therefore accessible, account of painting in New Zealand. This structure allows the book to be dipped into and threaded together in its varying ways rather than read through and unconsciously digested.

The scattered format also ties in with O’Brien’s framing of New Zealand painting as being characterised by ‘poozling’ and journeying. ‘Poozling’ – according to O’Brien – is a slang word native to Aotearoa that means the salvaging and collecting of things to use in other places – seems to be a child-friendly version of appropriation. Raising this idea early in the book, O’Brien cleverly introduces painting’s often self-referential nature, as well as establishing a framework for negotiating cultural overlaps and intersections. He touches on colonial and post-colonial politics, but in the main explores the folksier side of New Zealand painting, focusing on narrative veins of Maori myth and on the arrival and consequent development of European representational and figurative painting. Back and Beyond is not a history of New Zealand painting, and it does not claim to be; but more attention to abstraction and its proponents would have been, rewarding strategy for broadening understanding.

However, its rigour as an instructive text is confirmed by the inclusion of a comprehensive biographical section, along with a recommended reading list for many of the artists featured. An engaging activity page is also included; this challenges children to create their own version of Frances Hodgkins’ ‘Cherished Things’ — all part of O’Brien’s worthwhile attempt to coax the imaginative faculty forth in his readers with the hope of altering their aesthetic approach to the everyday, and thus cultivating a more alert way of seeing amongst the young and curious.

The act of drawing as a method for perceiving one world and creating entire other worlds is the basis for O’Brien’s biography of Graham Percy. Percy attended Elam and after graduating was a constant and exceptional contributor to the New Zealand School Journal, as well as an accomplished graphic designer who worked on book designs with writer Bruce Mason and on exhibition catalogues for Colin McCahon and the Ikon gallery artists. In 1964, Percy moved to London to take up a Queen Elizabeth scholarship at the Royal College of Art.

In A Micronaut in the Wide World O’Brien uses Percy’s Le Corbusier-esque townhouse in Wimbledon and its contents as a metaphor for Percy’s immersive love of building worlds within worlds, of exploring life’s minute details. O’Brien wrote the book in Percy’s home in the months immediately following his death in 2008, surrounded by the objects and art that Percy and wife Mari Mahr cherished. The loosely chronological account is heavily influenced by O’Brien’s interactions with Percy’s drawings and paraphernalia – as if O’Brien is conversing with Percy via these items. The book, divided into mini-chapters, takes the form of a modernist work of literature, which one feels Percy, a lover of the gently surreal, would have appreciated.

Approximately half of the book is devoted to Percy’s independent work created after the millennium, a decision that allows greater exploration of his formative experiences and unique inclinations as an artist. Rather than dwelling on Percy as a commissions-based illustrator, O’Brien argues an extremely convincing case for greater attention to be paid towards later bodies of work that include: ‘Arthouse’, ‘Imagined Histories’, ‘the Kiwi’, and ‘Alchemical Allotment’. These nuanced and intelligent series form the majority of the current touring exhibition curated by O’Brien. The inclusion of most of the plates means the book can easily stand alone as a comprehensive visual record of Percy’s career.

More than an article of pure documentation, A Micronaut in the Wide World is steeped in genuine humour. O’Brien’s light touch reflects the artist’s sanguine nature, infusing many of Percy’s life’s moments with an optimistic levity: beginning with his upbringing in the town of Stratford – complete with its surreal Shakespearean aspirations – his work within the Hungarian animated film industry and even in the recollection of Percy’s manner of dealing with the medical problems that affected him — first his colour blindness, then his series of strokes later in life. The book is an affirmation of the value of drawing, of travel, and of course of the imagination. O’Brien’s description of Percy and Mahr’s art as a type that ‘has a rare capacity to accommodate innocence and wonder without excluding knowledge, history and intelligence’ could equally be applied to both Back and Beyond and A Micronaut in the Wide World.

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JAMIE HANTON is a visual arts writer and curator hailing from Christchurch. He is currently the Director of The Blue Oyster Art Project Space in Dunedin.

Sense and Sensibility

June 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Lawrence Jones
The Commonplace Book: A Writer’s Journey through Quotations, by Elizabeth Smither (Auckland University Press, 2011), 192 pp., $34.99

‘Regarde. — Colette’s last word.’

This brief entry from one of Elizabeth Smither’s commonplace books might be the watchword of her volume. In her response to this quotation, she defines the meaning for her: ‘Regarde — to look, feel, wonder, accept, live.’ Another entry from the same commonplace book a few pages later complements this one: ‘Try to become someone on whom nothing is wasted. Henry James, advice to writers’. (Actually this is probably a misremembered version of James’s dictum from his 1884 essay, ‘The Art of Fiction’: ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost’). Smither’s interpretation is that James ‘is recommending a training for our senses, so that what we notice is observed in detail and subtlety’. Earlier in the same commonplace book a quotation from Junot Diaz at the 2008 Writers & Readers Festival in Auckland expresses a related idea: ‘Sometimes the thing you have to do is become the person that you need to be, to write the book that you want to write’. Smither’s response to this is metaphorical:

I’ve always profoundly believed that the presence of the writer is inevitably contained in the work just as the fingerprints of a burglar, who has forgotten to wear gloves, are left on the windowsill he has just escaped through. The critic or the constable arrives with the dusting powder and Voila! A good thumbprint where he levered up the latch or a middle finger on the glass. The style we write in reflects our character.

Her interpretations of the three quotations all point to the idea that the trained personal sensibility of the writer who looks, feels, wonders, accepts or notices and intuits a significance in what he or she sees will be evident in the writing that emerges from the experience, as individual as fingerprints.

Smither’s own fingerprints are all over The Commonplace Book. Her distinctive personal sensibility – quick, alert, curious, intellectual, aesthetic – is expressed not only in the style of her comments, but in the quotations she chooses, in the range of subject and feeling and concept that is found in them, in the things she looks at and the way she interprets them, and in the distinctive genre she has invented for the book. That genre is neither the notebook nor the diary nor the traditional commonplace book, but a combination of all of them. She has taken three of her commonplace books, ‘collection(s) of miscellaneous quotations extracts, pensées’, and made a ‘journey’ through them by flicking through and selecting entries that spoke to her at the moment and interspersing ‘suppositions, incidents, memories springing from the entries themselves’. She has made a personal selection from three personal collections and used those items as springboards for a variety of personal responses. Some of those responses are like diary entries, some are poems, some are anecdotal narratives, some are miniature personal essays, some are small pieces of subjective literary criticism. All carry the marks of her sensibility.

Readers of the novels The Sea Between Us and Lola, with their sequences about life in fine hotels, will see their basis in Smither’s own taste and experiences; shown in her response to a quotation from Hilary Mantel concerning the desirability of writers when they travel overseas going first-class and staying in ‘the best hotels’ – an agreement on the necessity of ‘short periods of luxury for authors to preserve their equilibrium and sanity. Only the best and most stylish hotel will do’. Her response then segues into accounts of her most pleasant experiences at literary festivals held in hotels in Melbourne and in Spain. Responses to other quotations lead to anecdotes from other recurrent experiences of the social side of literary life at poetry readings and book launches, including her own dislike of filling in the time at a lecture and reading by giving ‘a little of the background’ of the poems she reads, ‘as if each should-be-able-to-stand-on-its-own-feet poem needed a little autobiographical note the way a woman needs a purse’.

Many entries deal with the the writing process. The phrase from one of her poems, ‘Oh quick is my favourite word’, leads to a confession that she has ‘always been in love with speed, swiftness, ardour’, so that in writing a poem ‘There has to be the rush of words, the attempt to impress, to pull something off, something scattered and only half-thought-out. (I must think on my feet, metaphorically, as my hand scribbles)’. In several entries she contrasts the rapidity of composition with the painstaking slowness of proofreading, and her routine of taking breaks and rewarding herself in order to be able to keep going at it reminds me of the rituals I used to have for getting through a pile of Bursary examinations to mark. Editing she likewise describes as being painful:

as if … as if … three times it appears on the same page and two will have to be throttled and their carcasses thrown into a ditch. ‘Kill your darlings’ and it feels like Sophie’s Choice. The very best sentences are guillotined and protest.

But there is satisfaction at the end of the process when that ‘something’ that ‘may be stirring . . . somewhere below the surface’ of a novel becomes visible: ‘Later, when all the cutting, rewriting and removal of red clothes is complete, this mystery may be revealed: a strange sense of unknown things joining up, claiming a kinship (and giving your work a structure) you had never expected to find.’ In a response to a quotation from Fra Mauro, cartographer to the court of Venice – ‘What wisdom is acquired during the course of a life is the result of the mind’s tenderness towards the heart’ – she describes the process of editing Lola, weeks with ‘my mind definitely not showing a trace of kindness towards my heart, which was merely required to go on beating’. It took a ‘Marie Curie revival meal’ of ‘a little steak and pommes frites’ with a glass of red wine, followed by a chocolate brownie and a liqueur for her to recover. However, looking back at the experience she can say, ‘now I can admit I enjoyed it, the way a minister of war might enjoy going into a bunker’.

That metaphor for her feelings is very suggestive, as are many of her images. She has a simile for metaphors in her response to Diane Wakosi’s lines about metaphor – ‘I never know how far / for the sake of wisdom / to carry a metaphor’:

When I am mentoring I advise against lines too packed (like suitcases with some of the contents bulging out under the straps). It may be that the poet, through practice, has first to unpack. To sort through images like old clothing, familiar, comfortable, no longer fresh or co-ordinated, but put on almost in the manner of prejudices.

Such practical criticism is not reserved for those she is mentoring. One entry opens with a quotation from a letter by Lloyd Jones about how he is ‘trying to overcome the tyranny of narrative and dig down into moments that may or may not be connected or only connected because I have wilfully placed them side by side.’ The letter leads Smither to look at the way Katherine Anne Porter in ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’ moves into ‘deeper preoccupations’ than plot and to conclude with a tribute to ‘the marvellous Marilynne Robinson whose Gilead and Home recreate moments of such frustration and tension and grace you feel the whole of human nature is located in a shabby old-fashioned kitchen in a parsonage in Iowa’.

Many other themes that also occur in the poetry and fiction appear in The Commonplace Book. In two entries concerning Terry Sturm, Smither bring together some of her own ‘deeper preoccupations’ – friendship, death (often linked with it for one of her generation and mine), literature and its value, imagination. The first, a diary entry for 25 May 2009 early in the book, is her response to receiving the news of his death. She remembers her positive contacts with his human warmth, and pays tribute to his ‘truly fine intellect, founded not in egoism but in care, accuracy, and a great ability to think’ so that he could patiently work to find ‘the nearest we can come to truth’, whether in literary judgement or in human relations. The second, late in the book, is a meditative reading of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’: ‘Terry‘s favourite poem, fixed to the fridge’, the poem that had been read at his funeral, a poem ‘inexhaustible, beyond explanation, but not beyond comfort’, that tells us that ‘Existence, with imagination, is enough’.

In The Commonplace Book Elizabeth Smither, as she has done in her poems, her short stories and her novels, has found an appropriate vehicle for expressing her unique sensibility. She has left her fingerprints on another kind of fine verbal object.

LAWRENCE JONES is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Otago. He is at present finishing a critical work on the fiction of Maurice Gee and is assembling a collection of his essays of the last twenty years on New Zealand writers.