Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

School of Saint Augustine

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Chris Else
August, by Bernard Beckett (Text Publishing, 2011, $30.00)

A book that is billed as ‘a philosophical thriller’ poses unusual questions. We don’t judge science fiction by the accuracy of its science. Nor do we require historical novels to adhere strictly to the facts. In both cases, perhaps, we would want the writer to be aware of the accepted consensus and to take account of it but the whole point of fiction is that it involves an invented reality. Shadbolt’s Season of the Jew, for example, is a novel first and history second. How then should we approach a fiction that is centred round a philosophical problem? Does it really matter if the analysis of that problem is unsound or incomplete? Should one forget the philosophy and talk about the fiction or should one criticise the philosophy and the fiction? The answer, I suppose, is that it depends on the book.

In Tim Corballis’s Measurement the protagonist goes through a rite of passage that involves a confrontation with a philosophical text. To the initiated, the text described is a thinly disguised version of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. To the uninitiated this barely matters. The novel is not about whether Wittgenstein is right or wrong but about a particular character for whom the fictional text, with its pseudo-Wittgensteinian theses, is a reflection of a personal life view.
Beckett does not operate in quite this way. At the centre of his earlier novel, Genesis, is the question of whether or not computers could ever be considered conscious beings. Characters and plot are subservient to or aspects of the argument around this question, which involves the nature of mind and the relationship of mind and body. Beckett makes a fair fist of weighing up the standard theories as to whether or not the mind is anything other than the brain and he provides a clever twist towards the end that not only turns one of the reader’s key assumptions on its head but also nudges the argument towards a conclusion. Genesis was labelled as a young adult novel and it gave me the sense that Beckett, a secondary school teacher, was driven to write it by motives that were partly pedagogical. Such a book invites or even demands that its argument be a major focus of a critical response.
August takes a similar approach. This time the question is whether or not human beings have free will. Generally, philosophical questions resolve themselves into opposing positions. Cast them in fictional form, and this tendency results in some sort of contest or trial. In Genesis, the main protagonist is subject to examination by a tribunal. In August, there are two confrontations. In the narrative present, the hero, Tristan, is trapped in a wrecked car with Grace, a girl he is in love with despite having met her only once before. They recount their stories to one another: parallel and contrasting tales that offer reflections on the central argument. Grace has been brought up in a convent where strict conformity to a set of rules has governed her life, and from which she has been expelled because her feelings for her fellow human beings have led her into disobedience.
Tristan, whose story is more central to the book, has been cloistered in a school devoted to scholastic reasoning around the work of St Augustine. Here the second confrontation takes place, between Tristan and the Rector – the mentor and father figure who teaches, tempts and tests. Central to the discussion is a religious paradox. If God is omniscient then he knows the future. If he knows the future, a person’s actions are determined. But if behaviour is determined, people do not have free will and therefore God cannot hold them responsible for their actions.
In one sense, as Grace points out, this question has no bearing on a moral life. Whether or not actions are predetermined is irrelevant to the business of deciding what to do. Tristan and the Rector move beyond this point, however, and agree on a test: can the Rector predict what Tristan will do in a complex game that involves interaction with two other people and seems to offer a vast range of possible outcomes? Tristan, who believes that he has free will, bets that he cannot. The Rector believes otherwise. Tristan fails and discovers that, against all his expectations, prior to the contest, the Rector has written down a precise description of his actions.
The first observation that this scene suggests is that, if Tristan’s actions are predetermined so is the Rector’s prediction. To the extent that Tristan was not free, the Rector was not right. A second observation is that neither the Rector nor Tristan had any choice in what they did because they are the way Beckett wrote them. In a work of fiction the free will of all of the characters is, well, a fiction. This might suggest that a novel is a particularly unsuitable vehicle for exploring such philosophical terrain. Only real life is meaningful when it comes to questions of free will. If Beckett had taken the opposite course and written the scene so that the Rector failed, then the action, determined by the author, would have proved that Tristan had free will.
The question of free will versus determinism divides the world into two classes of people, the observers and the observed. From the point of view of the observer, the observed may or may not have free will. It is arguable that they don’t, at least to the extent that behaviour is initiated by neurological processes that can be observed in the brain before the person whose brain it is becomes conscious of them. From a scientific perspective, one that focuses on physical explanations, human behaviour is, in principle, reducible to processes that are either random or caused. If they are caused, then they are, again in principle, predictable. If they are random, they aren’t. Free will, on the other hand, operates within a point of view where thoughts are thought and decisions are made. Thus, no matter what conclusions we draw about the observed person, the observer always has free will. The behaviour of the characters is determined by the free will of the author. There are metafictional opportunities here that Beckett does not take up. Instead, he limits himself by continuing to work within the classical frame of the argument.
Tristan is crippled by the thought that he does not have free will and the cunning twist at the end turns on his last desperate attempt to prove his freedom. The relationship between the various layers of the plot is subtle and carefully worked. The various storylines are skilfully handled and offer a series of surprises as the reader gradually discovers that not only the characters themselves but also the whole world of the novel is not what it seems. In the end I felt disappointed that writing of this quality was devoted to such a limited exposition of the philosophical question. August, I felt, was a better novel than Genesis but poorer philosophy.

CHRIS ELSE is a novelist, and a partner in TFS Literary Agency and Assessment Service. He lives in Wellington.

The Melon Cow Lick and the Coin Boy

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Christine Johnston
Hokitika Town, by Charlotte Randall (Penguin Books, 2011, $30)

It’s a long time since I read a novel where the narrative voice is the outstanding and most memorable feature, perhaps even the whole point of the literary enterprise.  Charlotte Randall has created a likeable, though at times obtuse, first-person narrator, a Maori boy, making his way solo in the West Coast gold rush, like a child in a story by Charles Dickens. (Hokitika Town is subtitled ‘Life as a West Coast coin boy’. Who or what was a ‘coin boy’, I wondered – a child who dived for coins under a Rotorua bridge, perhaps? Wrong. Halfie, our narrator, doesn’t dive but can see the benefits of currency in the Pakeha world and goes after it in ways that are all his own.)
Charlotte Randall is an adventurous writer, not afraid to take on ambitious projects. Her second novel, The Curative (2000), featured William Lonsdale, as sane as the day is long, but incarcerated in London’s notorious Bedlam asylum in the early nineteenth century and undergoing horrendous cures for lunacy. It was an imaginative tour de force, winning considerable acclaim in New Zealand and overseas.
Subsequent novels have proved to be unpredictable in subject matter and scope: a retelling of the Faust story set in the world of professional tennis (Within the Kiss) and then a work that traced a present-day Petone family back to 1650s Oxford (What Happen Then, Mr Bones?). Hokitika Town, Randall’s sixth novel, starts as it means to go on:

I never seen nothing like this. Papa say whitey do things different from us, but he dint say how. Now I see it with my own eyes. Whitey’s ships is so big they choking up the river. Them ships got poles big as kauri trees and the poles got cloaks hanging off them. Mebee no one believe that back home, but I swear – whitey’s ships wear clothings.
The author uses Halfie’s narrative as expressed in his ever-improving ‘pidgin’ English to carry the story and to flesh out his personality. The words of other more articulate characters are written conventionally. Thus, while Ludovic says, ‘Sad? I’m not sad. I’m melancholic’, narrator Halfie writes ‘I melon cow lick.’
This use of language is inventive but presents its own challenges and irritations, especially when combined with a naive, often blundering, child-narrator, a big cast of characters (many endowed with given names and nicknames of Halfie’s invention), a frantic pace and an episodic structure. I didn’t always know what was going on and I felt uneasy at times. Was I laughing at Halfie or with him? Was Randall creating a kind of ‘Uncle Tom’ by attributing limited and idiosyncratic English to her protagonist? How would the Maori reader feel? (This reviewer was perhaps too squeamish.)
At first the writing style is an obstruction but the reader adapts and is soon powering through the streets of Hokitika and the cut-over bush with Halfie and the cast of eccentrics, as the pace of events quickens. There’s a lot going on, but it’s sometimes hard to see the wood for the trees.
The question that kept raising its head was ‘why’?
Halfie is always tearing off to earn a coin or avert a disaster, thereby creating several more, and we are with him one hundred-per-cent because he is a uniquely engaging protagonist. His broader motivation, however, remains mysterious. Why has he turned his back on his Maori ways and thrown in his lot with a bunch of such unattractive characters? Why does he stay with the alcoholic Ludovic, cleaning up vomit and keeping the hut tidy? Why does he care so much about the fate of Violet’s unborn child?
What distinguishes this novel also limits it. An articulate narrator might provide more hints for the reader. As it is, we are left to wonder. Even some ‘facts’ of this fiction remain blurry. Is Fortunatus a philanthropist or paedophile? It matters, surely?
While fragments of Halfie’s past emerge from time to time, they are not easy to grasp or put together in a coherent picture. His present tense is more compelling – the urge or the necessity to earn a few coins, to fill his belly and have a roof over his head in wet Westland, to be true to his friends and to outwit his enemies. Halfie is cunning enough to take matters into his own hands, often with unintended and calamitous results. He has our sympathy but he’s no angel: he tells lies, gets drunk on beer and high on painkillers. How old is he, I found myself wondering. Old enough to fall in love, apparently.
What drives the novel forwards? In some sense it’s Violet’s pregnancy that creates a time frame around which life surges. Whatever else happens, her belly is expanding and this is bound to cause trouble. Violet, a skivvy at the Bathsheba hotel, has befriended Halfie, helping him with his English and explaining the politics of Hokitika. She imagines herself to be more worldly-wise than her protégé, but is soon a girl in trouble with no one to lean on but Halfie. He can see what she can’t: that it will all end in tears. I found the episode of her giving birth less than plausible. Wouldn’t she seek out an older woman to assist her rather than a lad she already has grave doubts about? 
The novel has drama that always threatens to boil over into melodrama in the Wild West tradition. There is One Eye and his gang versus the Gold Escort; parties, balls, and ‘bunfights’ at the Bathsheba pub; and Griffith’s messy demise. More rounded and satisfying characters include alcoholic Ludovic, the pious ‘philosopher’, and his nemesis – Kaspar Schmidt, atheist and free-thinker. Needless to say, their ideological disputes are largely lost on Halfie.
Some characters – the publican and his wife, for instance, who seem grotesquely unsympathetic in the first half of the novel – mellow into humanity as the story goes on. (Mr Flewelling used to confine his wife in a drugged state in her bedroom.) Towards the novel’s end there arises a ‘happy families’ atmosphere that is heart-warming but seems at odds with what has gone before.
Still, this is a novel with heart and the reader can only rejoice that Violet’s baby brings out the best in people. Halfie has turned things around. Randall has created a character who may baffle the reader, but there is no doubt that he engages our sympathy. In the end, wanting to be known by his Maori name Tiwakawaka, he embarks on a new adventure with a more purposeful and rejuvenated Ludovic:

Ludo take my shoulders and turn me to look at him. He put a palm on each of my cheeks. They rilly cold. Then he say I a boy that bring sunshine to his soul.
                                                                                                           
CHRISTINE JOHNSTON is a Dunedin writer. She has written novels, short stories and essays.

Holding the Baby

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Vaughan Rapatahana 
Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa, by Tina Makereti (Huia Publishers, 2010)

Kia ora mo tenei pukapuka Tina. Ka nui te pai tau pakiwaitara kei konei.
 I enjoyed this initial collection of tales by Tina Makereti. It’s refreshing, rarely boring, easy to read. The stories rebound and resound with echoes from one to the other, motifs recur as time and legend intertwine in a patterning of melded possibilities and possible meldings.
The quick stick label is ‘magic realism’: Makereti’s craft is in veneering extra-sensory perceptions and other-worldliness onto quotidian contingency. Her quotidian, in turn, is permeated with marginalisations of ethnicity and gender. There is a Borges-like quality to some tales – as in Eli’s massive polyglottism in the god child, which brings to mind Funes the Memorious. Eli also hears the sounds of thoughts. There is the synaesthesia of seeing colour in words in off-beat; while Rosie listens to the talk of inanimate objects in blink. The analogue of Kirlian photography – the suggestion of ghostly auras – segues everywhere in this collection; that is, there is an ambient aura around many of the main protagonists, while dream-like states also billow within narratives, flowing through, for example, top-knot and shapeshifter.
Maori mythology is ever-present, albeit in contemporaneous settings (in Maoritanga, past and present are all one anyway), as for example the way in which the mountains and rivers animate the kuia, her tipuna, her mokopuna in kaitiaki. Everything integrates ki te ao o nga iwi Maori; it’s only the one-dimensional Pakeha boyfriends sketched into these stories who are given to prate such lines as, ‘Perhaps there are things humanity is not aware of’, and ‘It’s just, the world’s so huge, you know? The universe is a freakin’ crazy place and I know nothing about it.’ Tina Makereti senses and depicts the Other as always here. Her magic realism is actually our true diurnal ethos. In effect, she is more a mirror to the Maori experience than she is a second-hand Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Carlos Fuentes. She is one who senses the atua as well as the kehua everywhere. Her stories transmogrify into purakau. The marginal becomes mainstream.
So Maui-Tikitiki-a-Taranga is always around the corner here: as in the tales top-knot, ahi, mokomoko – maybe also via the lizard king allusions in blink. Pania of the Reef scores her own anthropomorphic role in shapeshifter. And, of course, the lead-off piece is a clever reciting/re-siting of Tane Mahuta claymaking Hineahuone, after his schisms with Tumatauenga, in skin and bones. Tihei mauriora indeed: a heart-starter to get the collection pumping, eh.
So also, the whanau situations – growing up in broken homes, broken in more ways than one. Lack of pingers. Lack of love. Lack of food. Violence. Too much piss being drunk. Being a whangai. Being a solo Mum. Losing babies. Loser (Pakeha) boyfriends with grabby hands and grubby potential-to-impregnate. Lack of many male role-models. Multi-generational fluxes and flows. Dying with whanau me whanaunga around, and then the tangi. Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa is essentially about growing up Maori. Just bite into what men do. Savour kaitiaki. Taste the textures in the order of things. Chew on in the end – which, of course, just has to be the last tale in this book, detailing the tangential aspects of tangi.
And what after death but to begin again? After all: ‘There was a woman and a man/there was a man and a woman’ are the words, the thematic words, which not only fuse the cycle of the single story the order of things, but also iterate the cyclical nature of the entire collection.
Furthermore, this is a woman’s book, making it all the more powerful. By this I mean that the book is about female-centred experience: babies, birth, sex (frustrated or enjoyed), best friends (as in off-beat for example), best friends as (twin) sisters in mokomoko and tree, the rabbit and the moon – and the strong bonding thus involved. But even more crucial than all this is the blight and plight of male–female relationships – where the woman, all too often, is left – quite literally – holding the baby, though sometimes voluntarily. For, as Pania reflects: ‘Sometimes I think men just take what they want.’ Which is also why some stories meander, dribble into flaccidity; the relationship entailed was also going nowhere, and it is the woman left staunch or staunching.
All this combined thematic interplay is manifested most clearly in mokomoko, where the strands of Maori wahine in relation to Maui, of madness in relation to men (husband-fathers), of birth/death in relation to dreaming, all weave together. The underlying viewpoint of Makereti’s whole anthology is the one Hine-nui-te-po articulates: ‘There would always be this thing between men and women, both grappling with their fear, both loving and maiming and making a mess of it all. Even the gods made mistakes.’
One sister here learns how to exist again from her twin talking Hine’s story – just as Makereti talks tales, so as to reveal that their telling might indicate states of mind beyond just blather: ‘there was a way of understanding the world that went beyond words … the quiet place … was more real than all the words uttered in Babel.’ In the end, it is Makereti’s gift that her pakiwaitara convey the possibility of a transcendent silence.
Kia ora ano mo te taonga.

VAUGHAN RAPATAHANA is a poet and writer from Aotearoa New Zealand currently living and teaching in Hong Kong.

The Eye and Hand in Action

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Jodie Dalgleish
Richard Parker: Objectspace Masters of Craft, by Richard Fahey (Objectspace, Auckland, 2010), 119 pp., $35.00.

Together with curator and author Richard Fahey and photographer Haru Sameshima, Auckland’s Objectspace gallery has produced a thoughtful and generously illustrated exhibition publication and monograph on the distinctive work of Richard Parker. As Objectspace Director Philip Clarke states in his Foreword, this publication is intended to position Parker as a Master of Craft in the first of what, it is hoped, will be a series of small books telling the stories of New Zealand’s master makers. In doing so, it is also intended to confirm the gallery’s dedication to the artful and craft-centric practice and process of object-making in this country. Richard Parker: Objectspace Masters of Craft augurs well on both counts. This reader’s only reservation is its slightly awkward structure that distributes similar information on Parker’s art across three chapters and an Afterword, in a manner that diffuses a full understanding of the richness of the artist’s craft. 


 Although craft has for centuries been a central part of human life, both its international and national history, and a theory of what it is and why it is important, has been largely neglected. It was only in 1997, for example, that American theorist Howard Risatti published an inaugural and internationally relevant theory of craft. Responding to this absence at a local level, Fahey begins his essay with an attempt to summarise a history of craft in New Zealand. In his first chapter entitled ‘The background to a practice: Positioning craft’, Fahey explains that Parker was initially swept up by a national obsession for utilitarian and faux-primitive pottery, before striking out in his search for objects that were more personal and alive.
Fahey’s outline is useful and necessary, but he does not mention his subject, Richard Parker, until he is four pages into his first chapter. Beginning with a telling quote from the artist, he goes on to discuss Parker’s fascination with craft’s physiological effect. Specifically, he introduces the artist’s notion of a natural ‘peripheral vision’– one that engages the eye and mind in an instinctive search for a variety of line and form – and links this to the historical concept of the restorative capacity of craft. Thus it can be said – with deference to Risatti’s view of the essential importance of contemporary craft – that Parker’s work is informed by a historically charged understanding of the life-supporting function of hand-made craft objects, and of how that function provides a dynamic link to the natural world today. For, as Fahey eventually explains, Parker’s lively pots seem to talk, walk, hustle and dance on the periphery of the uniform and ordinary, and in their liveliness remain open to reinvestigation and rediscovery.
The second chapter, ‘The precarious art of nonchalance: Positioning the ceramics’, goes into more detail and provides a richer discussion of Parker’s works and oeuvre. Fahey begins with a discussion of William Hogarth’s view of beauty and his notion of the serpentine line, which Parker could be said to have discovered in his own practice of drawing a wire through a block of inert clay. From there, the author more fully describes the physiological impact of Parker’s pots. Significantly, Fahey states that Parker’s vases are animated and petition us to become animated: they are optimistic, celebratory objects.
Fahey begins the next part of his second chapter with an exposition on the way in which Parker’s works acknowledge the importance of a vessel’s function, even while they flirt with  subversion of that practical use. As the author explains it, the artist’s works deny the courteous decorousness of a vase’s traditional form, and consequently deceive us about their interior volume through their studied and emphatic demonstrations of ornament and decoration. For, as the author points out in summary, it is the three-dimensional movement of Parker’s vessels that makes them what they are: the pointing of their toes, the lift of their chins, the upholding of their arms, the swing of their feral hips – their particular life, which he has explored and played around with over years with a singular intensity.
Finishing his chapter with an outline of the formal quirks – the decorative glazing and calligraphic syntax – of the artist’s oeuvre, Fahey seeks to further substantiate his central contention that the artist’s mastery is in his light touch, the deftness of his myriad and subtle variations on a theme, his ‘art of nonchalance’. Although use of the word ‘nonchalance’ grated against the idea of mastery for this reader, Fahey’s contention is persuasively illustrated by Sameshima’s photographs, which are well-spaced throughout the chapter and beyond. Most effectively, two central images lay out a double-page spread of vase alongside vase and aperture alongside aperture. Without fail, Sameshima’s carefully lit and composed photographs capture the characterful life of each work, the conversations implied between them, and the delightful intricacies of their surface.
Fahey’s third chapter, ‘Serendipity & single-mindedness: Positioning the man’, outlines the family upbringing and serendipitous series of events and decisions that led Parker to build his first kiln on a rented property in Northland in the late 1970s. Through this narrative, the author appropriately emphasises the hand-led experiments of the artist and his determination to make a particular kind of pot. At the same time, he recognises the importance of the support of Parker’s immediate family and the encouragement of other artists. Following this, Fahey makes it clear that this ceramicist has paid his dues and established his credentials. He goes on to substantiate his claim that Parker is now well known within the local and international ceramic fraternity as an artist with a distinctive point of view.
An ‘Afterword’ closes Fahey’s extended essay by offering a final exploration of Parker’s art. Entitled ‘Positioning the artist’, it’s a summary in which the author returns to Parker’s special world of perception: his mission to capture and share the dynamics of an inquisitive attention that defies predictability, his pursuit of a deep sensory appreciation of natural variety in the simplest of decorative rhythms. Drawing further on the author’s commentary, I add my own conclusion: that Parker’s pots perform the role of bringing human memory into the present for the constant pleasure of discovering the potential of the human eye and hand in action.

JODIE DALGLEISH is a curator, critic and author currently living in Wellington. She is a regular contributor to online art journal EyeContact, and she has a Masters of Creative Writing from AUT University.

Three Ways to Divide Poems

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Cy Mathews
Lost Relatives, Siobhan Harvey (Steele Roberts 2011), 71 pp; in/let, Jo Thorpe (Steele Roberts 2011), 63 pp; So Goes the Dance, Stu Bagby (Steele Roberts 2010), 64 pp.


A good book of poems should be more that just a collection of whatever the poet has been writing over the past few years; it should have a shape, a thematic structure that holds together between its covers just as soundly as each individual poem holds together on the page (or should it? For whenever I make such a pronouncement, it occurs to me that the opposite might be true: poetry books as junk-piles, as cluttered basements and attics, any trace of shape or cohesion blow apart by the words …  for the sake of this review however, we’ll stick with my original statement …). Many current New Zealand poets attempt to give their books structure through the simple device of dividing the text up into sections. Most of the new books I’ve read this year have worked this way, their contents chopped up into bite-sized chunks – sometimes titled, sometimes numbered – for more meaningful consumption. The three works I review today are no exception. Each of them attempts to structure their content at the level of the contents page, in differing ways and with differing degrees of success.
              Siobhan Harvey’s use of sections is somewhat playful. Lost Relatives is divided up into two main sections, titled respectively ‘Lost’ and ‘Relatives’. Each section is further separated into two titled subsections: under ‘Lost’, we find ‘The Émigré Lands’ and ‘Whanau Farewelled’; under ‘Relatives’, ‘My Son and I’ and ‘My Theory of Relativity’. Themes of migration and travel, and the dislocations from family and familiarity that results from such things, run through all these sections. Various forms of flight are used as frequent – if unsurprising – metaphors, the book scattered with birds, airplanes and airports. In counterpoint to these airborne elements is the suggestion of the pull of gravity and the ultimately limited nature of movement and travel. As Harvey puts it:

           now I see that birds and people are one:
           for both, migration is a cage

          whose door is always open
          but whose captive refuses to leave 

Many of the poems are powerfully physical. Titles like ‘Tooth’, ‘Losing your umbilicus’, and ‘Clavicle’, all found in the ‘Relatives’ sections, iterate the concrete nature of bloodline and the visceral nature of separation. There is an occasional flat note – as, for example, when Harvey takes the flight trope to its most clichéd extreme and evokes Icarus as a metaphor for the aspirations and disappointments of migration – but these moments are rare, and are redeemed by such fresh and simple lines as:

           . . . You were
           a book living in a different library

As the title suggests, this is a contemplative and, at times, melancholy book. Harvey walks a fine line between meditation and fantasy, and seems well in control of her poetry. Of the three books under review, hers is the one with the most satisfying sense of overall shape: an arc of poems in flight, cohesive, yet with a touch deft enough to remain also allusive.


                                        ***

Like Harvey, Jo Thorpe goes for the titled-sections option; she divides in/let up into ‘Mother tongue’, ‘How to dance your own body’s legend’, and ‘the warrior ethos’. Dance is of great importance to the book: Thorpe herself is a dancer, dance critic, and teacher of dance history at the New Zealand School of Dance. The cover illustration of in/let is a bold blue-on-white Matisse print of a leaping dancer. This vibrant, abstract image, combined with the playful typography of Thorpe’s title, led me to expect poems more stylistically experimental on the page. This was not, however, the case: Thorpe’s poems are formally quite conventional, enacting few typographical leaps or pirouettes. For the most part, they likewise take a conventionally lyrical approach to their subject matter. Yet within these conventions there is something more challenging and experimental going on. There’s frequently an odd clunkiness to Thorpe’s diction, a tendency towards unusual word combinations that can cause the reader to give a double-take. Lines sometimes run on just one beat too long, or seem almost syntactically garbled (yet aren’t). For example:

           One makes dances for the febrile wire zinging inside us
           or

           Tell infantry men, bearers of
           searchlights: why perimeter not convivial space?

Her similes can also be odd: in the same poem that the above two lines come from (‘An ABC of allegiance’), she describes a butoh dancer as ‘intent as an ant’. While there is certainly something insect-like about butoh dance, the frenetic and industrious ant seems an inappropriate comparison. Yet butoh itself – that strange, grotesque form of dance/performance that arose out of post-atomic bomb Japan – does resonate with the slightly awkward, strained nature of Thorpe’s style. While her poems may not dance visually, at the level of line and phrase they make strange leaps and jerks, circling around their subject matter in intriguing and stimulating ways. And while the three-part structure of her text seems somewhat arbitrary, adding little to the overall structure or meaning, the book nevertheless forms a satisfying unity.


                                                ***


Despite its title, Stu Bagby’s So Goes the Dance does not lend itself to such metaphors. Bagby’s style is casual and, at times, colloquial. The poems occasionally dip into rhyme, usually in the form of whimsical couplets:

           Could we form a nexus,
           say, in Paris, Texas?

It’s interesting that rhyme seems reserved for such playful moments; when Bagby turns to more serious subjects, he shifts gears into free verse. So Goes the Dance is divided up into four parts. Parts 2 and 3 focus on specific subjects: aging and death in the former; literature and the experience of writing in the latter. Part 1 and 4 however, seem more miscellaneous, essentially assemblies of occasional verse.
In most of the poems, Bagby’s lyrical ‘I’ is firmly foregrounded; he writes about memories of childhood, recollections of people and of landscapes, and about scenes outside his window. Moment leads on to moment: in one poem, the act of picking beans in the garden reminds the poet of Les Murray, which leads into a recollection of Australian coins, which further sparks some meditations upon Queen Elizabeth. The poem ends up in a nicely offbeat place, as the poet, amongst his beans, imagines the decapitated head of the Queen tumbling through space. Another poem, ‘And how come it’s raining’, also experiments with surreal and uncanny imagery, and is quite beautiful as a result.

                                                                           ***


            To return, then, to the subject of form. Harvey’s book provides an example of a well-structured work that uses internal sections to subtle effect. In contrast, the collections by Thorpe and Bagby benefit little from their internal divisions. Their senses of shape and theme – and make no mistake, both these books do have shapes and themes – would come across just as strongly without such sectioning. In Bagby’s case, the book would be stronger without its division into parts; the focus of sections numbered 2 and 3 makes sections 1 and 4 look somewhat aimless in comparison. Removing these sections, and allowing the poems to flow on from one to another, would avoid this impression, and would allow stronger resonances to swim through each text. As readers, we don’t always need our poems packaged up into neat containers. As poets, we should remember that form and structure shouldn’t be mistaken for a well-ordered table of contents.

CY MATHEWS is a poet and a post-graduate student in the English Department at the University of Otago.