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New Zealand books in review

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.

Classic Review: The Reservoir and Other Stories by Janet Frame

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James Bertram
This month’s ‘out of the archives’ review is of Janet Frame’s 1966 novel The Reservoir and Other Stories, by Rhodes scholar and journalist James Bertram.

The Reservoir and other stories, by Janet Frame (Pegasus, 1966). 22s. 6d.

This is the first collection of short stories by Janet Frame to become generally available in this country since The Lagoon in 1951: in the light of her remarkable achievement as a novelist of steadily increasing power and range, it is a literary event of some importance. Thirty prose pieces have been chosen (with the help of Dr Margaret Dalziel) from two volumes published three years ago in New York; the stories are not dated, but it seems clear from the chronological sketch outlined by the writer in ‘Beginnings’ (Landfall, March 1965) that most of them belong to the London years which saw the completion of that ‘transitional’ novel The Edge of the Alphabet, and preceded the more disciplined, structured, and completely professional accomplishment of Scented Gardens for the Blind and The Adaptable Man. It is not surprising, then, that this collection should produce a somewhat uneven effect, as if these were the by-products of a talent fiercely concentrated on larger designs.

I find it hard to write of Janet Frame with any detachment, for she cannot put words on a page without generating the kind of magnetic attraction that seizes and locks the reader’s sensibility. But any brief description of The Reservoir would have to note that these stories vary considerably in length and manner, that they explore extremes of realism and of fantasy, that while some are precisely located (in the ‘Waimaru’ countryside or suburban London), others are parables or poetic fables for our time written with the burning urgency of a Blake or a Dostoievsky. The experience of reading this book is rather like bathing in a thermal lake: we move from slices of life in the earlier manner of The Lagoon, familiar and reassuring even if sad, to chilling intimations of a private or general doom. And doom is sometimes as capricious and arbitrary as the ending of a fairy tale.
Perhaps the total effect of all this is rather like the quality of modern life, where the bogies, heaven knows, are real enough. Perhaps dreams more often terrify than console. If so, this book has more unity of vision, and even of theme, than at first appears. But I must admit my own preference for the stories which attempt to say limited and particular things by the conventional means of fiction, to those pieces which try, by shock tactics, to say too much.
The first third of this book is made up of short fables, mostly minatory, grouped around two longer fairy tales, one pleasant, one distinctly unpleasant. All are written with great skill and a stylized compression of language which barely controls the force of protest behind them: this voice is carefully’ modulated, that it may not break. It would not help to transpose these parables into the specific terms of contemporary politics, or even of perennial morality: these are ‘illuminations’, private intuitions with universal application. We may recognize the calligraphy, but we must spell out the content for ourselves. The best of these pieces, I think, is ‘Two Sheep’, which is more Tolstoyan than Kafkaesque, and seems to me a small masterpiece in its own kind.
The central group of ‘Waimaru’ stories begins with ‘The Reservoir’, and brings us back within hailing distance of The Lagoon. This is the remembered world of childhood, of children seen with adult understanding and of fumbling adults seen with a child’s clear unsentimental gaze. Here Janet Frame can hardly put a foot wrong: she is of the country, and she is of the country of words. The Reservoir’, ‘Royal Icing’, ‘The Bull Calf’, are stories complete in themselves where a sense of place and atmosphere is fully achieved, stories we may learn to know New Zealand by. Others in this group – ‘Prizes’, ‘Stink-pat’, ‘A Sense of Proportion’ – are more inward and disturbing; they tell secrets, without shame. The narrative line is sometimes harsh but still clear; we do not need the occasional final sentence, or paragraph, to draw the moral. Technically, these New Zealand stories are assured, straightforward, and refreshingly direct. I do not know if Miss Frame feels they are too easy for her to write, too like Katherine Mansfield; but for my part, I wish there were more of them.
In the last section of the book, we meet work which seems to me much more obviously experimental, studio studies by a writer who is extending her range of subject matter and making herself into a novelist. ‘The Teacup’ is a grim genre-study of lodging-house life in London, faithful in detail but dull and dispiriting as the people who inhabit it. ‘Burial in Sand’ twists the knife in the old, still-bleeding wound of the artistic expatriate; ‘The Triumph of Poetry’ does the same thing, less surely, with the fate of the artist on the home front. (Why, one faintly protests, are all academics in our fiction condemned to early desiccation? No doubt it is an occupational hazard; but Miss Frame has less reason to take this unkindly view than some of our poets, or Mr Patrick White.) The remaining stories are variations on the theme of human loneliness or frustration in the desert of modern cities; one may admire the honesty with which they are presented, without granting them more than a measure of success in their own right. An exception must be made of one admirable piece of social comedy, ‘A Relative of the Famous’,
where people are allowed to be amusingly, not horrifyingly absurd.
                  Dostoievsky once claimed that all the best of Russian fiction in his own time had come out from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’. In New Zealand writing, it would have to be ‘The Garden Party’ – that period piece, remote now as an Edwardian album, where the shadow first fell suddenly across the sunny colonial lawn. An awareness of the fragility of life, of the nearness of death, has been with Janet Frame from the time when she made that first story which she still considers her best: ‘Once upon a time there was a bird. One day a hawk came out of the sky and ate the bird. The next day a big bogie came out from behind the hill and ate up the hawk for eating up the bird.’ The hawk and the bogie still haunt her pages, but she has learnt how to keep them at bay with the magic spell of words. For the patterned words, and all the talent and courage behind them, we can only be grateful.

Literary Promenades

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Murray Edmond

Two Walk in Edinburgh, photographs by Mari Mahr, poems by Gregory O’Brien, afterword by Jenny Bornholdt (The Holloway Press, 2011, $225.00); A Morning Walk in the Later Days, by Leonard Lambert (Cold Hub Press, 2010, $18.00); Devonport: A Diary/Esplanade, by Bill Direen (The Holloway Press, 2011, $100).

No book is just a book: it is always framed by the occasion of its production. In the instance of the three books under consideration here, we have two books as objets d’art (Devonport and Two Walk in Edinburgh) and one chapbook (A Morning Walk). These two types of book are at the opposite ends of a continuum. The term ‘chapbook’ comes from those who once sold them: chapmen, hawkers of tracts, ballads and pamphlets. ‘Chap’ itself originates long ago in the Old English word for ‘barter’. Leonard Lambert’s A Morning Walk in the Later Days belongs to a series of poetry chapbooks from Cold Hub Press in Governor’s Bay. The other two volumes are from Holloway Press and the material stakes and aesthetic values are at the high end of the market.
Having myself created a book of writing plus photography (with Joanna Forsberg’s photos) for Holloway Press (The Fruits Of,  in 2009), I’m not sure I should be commenting on another Holloway book of photos and writing, especially one that seems to do everything opposite to ours; this Mahr/O’Brien book being clear, logical, illustrative, descriptive, black and white, very much to-the-point. You read the poems, and you read the photos – or rather you scan the pages, as Vilem Flusser terms it, as if running your hands over them, as if scanning with two hands – in the manner of a Braille reader: one hand reading the structure of the image, and the other hand reading the observer’s intentions. As the observer in this instance, I must now reveal my intentions.
When you read Gregory O’Brien’s poem and it says, ‘The hand contained but one/thought, the unopening window/another’ and the photo opposite contains a hand and a window and the next poem reads, ‘With its invisible hands and clock-like face’ and the photo opposite shows a disc like a clock face without hands and a single number (‘10’) on that face and the face is mounted on a building façade like a public clock might be, and so on, then you know you are in the realm of the symbolically illustrative: poem illustrates photo, photo illustrates poem, encoded meaning is doubly doubled. The problem with this is the redundancy. Nothing much is added by either component. The hope is that the partnership will create an intensification by repetition. Mahr’s photos, in themselves, already to some extent operate like intensification systems. They are curiously like stills from a Bergman movie from the 1950s (Winter Light or Wild Strawberries). There is not much composition of image, rather a literary placing of objects in the frame (a plaster hand, a sizing brush, an old book, a sunflower, or most Wild Strawberries-ish, a pocket watch slung round a stone pillar). All this in black and white only. These are images for decoding in a linear way: ‘What does the watch mean?’ the photo asks us. In her note at the end of the book, Jenny Bornholdt tells us what the watch means: ‘In this moment time is held.’ So we know, in that kind of way. Holloway Press produces beautiful books of a wide variety within the book-as-fine-art-object-in-itself type. This one feels exactly like that type of book should be, but not more than that.

***

Leonard Lambert’s poems focus on coming to the end and looking back. It’s that moment in life when ‘the long ago’ is ‘oddly close.’ What the hell did father do about this moment? He tried to get his bearings: ‘My father was always putting up weather vanes.’ It is not hard to hear the vanity in this. Lambert’s poems sniff out vanity, as if he himself was that ‘greying dog’ he uses as an image of ‘winter’ (and it’s not really winter, it’s his approaching old age as if he were winter, and so the images circle back and bite their tails). In the poem called ‘Community Service’ he claims life is more a ‘sentence’ than a ‘gift’. Yet you get the sneaky feeling that he’s quite enjoying being here and noticing that it is like this. These poems are subject to their own usurpation.
          It surely is the hour of the final death-knell of World War II fathers, here and in Jeffrey Paparoa Holman’s book Fly Boy (Steele Roberts, 2010). But we should make a clean breast and confess that these small laments are for ourselves. It’s all a ‘swan-song of sorts’ as Lambert notices as he writes about remembering the Vulcan bomber flying over: ‘a small boy’s heart stood still.’ Dead then, and now soon to die. Rue the day. Maybe at such a moment there’s only loss to remember, but what can poetry do about this? That question is not taken up here and it might have made the poetry more alive, while there’s still time, if it had been. Ovid noted it all in the opening of his Metamorphoses, how the Golden Age gave way to the Silver, then the Bronze, and last the Iron, but immediately he went on to tell all those stories of transformation. 

***

Bill Direen’s diary of his time of holding the Michael King Writing Fellowship at the University of Auckland and living in the Signalman’s House on Mount Victoria, Devonport, which is part of the Michael King Centre, juggles with and meditates on the problems of the diary form itself; whether the quotidian should be filled with the marvellous or the mundane. He confronts the insects in the kitchen, and relates this sense of embattlement to living next to the naval base and on a hill with gun emplacements dating back to the imagined Russian invasion of New Zealand. He stands on the edge of the lapping tide and launches into a delightful diversion about the moon, the tides and the ‘principal lunar semidiurnal’.
Finding a good diversion is counter-ballast to plodding though the days, diary-style. There is something quaintly Beckettian in Direen’s counting and numbering and obsessive trips to the tide line ‘to stand calmly by the water.’ The aimlessness of being a writer begins to shine through. My grandmother once asked me, ‘What do you want to write poetry for’ and I took the opportunity to play the smart-arse and reply, ‘That’s the point, it’s pointless.’ Direen, who, has lived in France for some time (as Beckett did) plays the scales of existential and geographical alienation: ‘I’m not of this place./Am of this place.’ The Beckett echo is from the end of Waiting for Godot: ‘Let’s go. They do not move.’ Direen looks at the landscape and see its impermanence, of which the tsunami is one possible agent: ‘everything is bach-like/it could all go in a wave.’ Vladimir in Godot looks at the landscape and describes it as ‘indescribable.’
Direen’s diary goes beyond description, whether literal or symbolic, in search of an awareness of the endeavour of writing itself, surprising himself in discovering what he is engaged at. He wonders how to know if the diary form is finished. Quoting Matisse about not repeating a line, he questions the validity of re-writing. Just as a book is never simply a book, so he notes that there are many kinds of notebooks. The notebook, basis of this printed diary, returns the reader’s focus to the moments of composition. And this notebook/diary records the moment of the September earthquake in Christchurch, where Direen’s father and brother and sister-in-law are located. The writing response to the quake consists of a series of Joycean (James Joyce being Beckett’s mentor) language flourishes: ‘Manmade … mad made.’  At the core of this intriguing meditation, in its plain and tasteful Holloway Press presentation, is an ambiguous curiosity about the very act of recording in writing – ‘Writing dares to oppose all that disguises things as they are’ (p. 25) – that might derive from the elegant paradoxes of French literary theory. At the same time, Direen’s writing contains an almost naïve directness: ‘I will probably never live in such a nice place as the signalman’s house …. ever again.’
A short fiction, ‘Esplanade,’ is appended to the diary. Once again Joycean flourishes appear, this time as the call-girl approaches the Esplanade Hotel where B (the particle) waits. For Direen, like Beckett, French and English are his writing languages. Like Beckett, when asked whether he was English (and the same would apply if he were asked if he were French) he could reply: ‘Au contraire’. He is located here, in his diary.

MURRAY EDMOND teaches drama at the University of Auckland. His most recent volume of poetry is Walls to Kick and Hills to Sing From: A Comedy with Interruptions (AUP, 2010). He edits the on-line journal Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics: http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/kmko/

Quintessentially No. 8

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David Elworthy
Living Language: Exploring Kiwitalk, by Elizabeth Gordon (Canterbury University press, 2010), 256 pp., $35.00;  In the Paddock and on the Run, by Dianne Bardsley (Otago University Press, 2010) 464 pp, $50.00; Place Names of New Zealand, by A.W. Reed, revised by Peter Dowling (Raupo Books, 2010) 502 pp., $50.00.

Within a decade or two of their first arrival in New Zealand, English-speaking settlers began to note the changes wrought upon their native tongue by their experiences in a new environment – and their descendants have been gleefully analysing the development of New Zealand English ever since. Elizabeth Gordon’s Living Language: Exploring Kiwitalk and Dianne Bardsley’s In the Paddock and on the Run are recent additions to the pantheon, while A.W. Reed’s Place Names of New Zealand has recently appeared in a new enlarged edition revised by Peter Dowling.
            Many years ago I was lunching with Professor Ian Gordon of Victoria University, who at the time was helping to compile a New Zealand edition of the Collins English Dictionary. ‘The language of all the English-speaking peoples,’ he declared, ‘is moving in the direction of New Zealand English.’ I was stunned and delighted by this bold statement, as I had always been taught that the colourful local words we brought to school represented a corruption of the King’s English and should be exorcised at all costs. I recall submitting a story in which I wrote ‘cow bail’, only to have it corrected to ‘cow byre’ by my English teacher. Is there any local sharemilker (now there’s a fine Kiwi word) who has ever used the word ‘byre’?
            These recollections came to mind as I took up Elizabeth Gordon’s Living Language: Exploring Kiwitalk, for the author, a former lecturer in English and Linguistics at the University of Canterbury, is refreshingly free from the heavy load of prejudices carried by so many of us when we discuss the use and abuse of our beloved English language. The book gets off to a slightly unfortunate start for a wordsmith, with an unnecessary little verb floating freely in the fourth line of the Introduction, but after that Gordon treats us to a thoroughly enjoyable and quirky wander through the idiosyncrasies of our version of the world’s most widely-spoken tongue.
            Given that the book is a compilation of Gordon’s regular articles on New Zealand English in The Press, each chapter in Living Language stands on its own, but this makes for diverting dipping. The articles cover all aspects of our language, from a thoughtful analysis of the definite article and indefinite article to a useful outline of the te reo words that have rocketed into our everyday speech over the past decade. The author is particularly strong on what have always been regarded by the language snobs (and I am one of them) as ‘poor language habits’, but which in her view are more often than not either relics from dialects in Britain, such as our frequent pronunciation of ‘somethink’ and ‘nothink’, or ‘growen’ for ‘grown’ and ‘knowen’ for known’. She also discusses genuine changes in the vernacular, often initiated by the young, such as the new transitive verb ‘to vers’. Thus kids on a Friday will say, ‘Who are you versing tomorrow?’ or ‘We versed them last week.’
            Gordon uses personal experience to illustrate the changes that are taking place in the New Zealand vernacular, a technique that happily removes any lingering flavour of academia. She also ranges far and wide, as befits a book of newspaper columns, with some of my favourites, such as ‘Hokey-pokey hanky-panky’, having little to with Kiwitalk at all. But for all lovers of language this book makes for pleasant bedside browsing. It has certainly dented some of my fusty prejudices, even if it has failed to eliminate them altogether.
            As someone brought up on a sheep farm I found In the Paddock and On the Run particularly enjoyable. Dianne Bardsley, as befits the Director of the New Zealand Dictionary Centre at Victoria University, has written a thoroughly academic work, with every entry scrupulously annotated with historical citations. But such is the rich diversity of the bucolic words and phrases she has collected that even the most carefree dipper can find a gem on almost every page.
            The introductory section of the book appears somewhat cramped, but there are some fine illustrations, and I was immediately captivated by the chapter listings, which are delightfully rumbustious for what purports to be an academic dictionary. They range from ‘Aggies, Baggies, and Grubbing Gangs (Roles and identities), through ‘Hokonuis, Hermits and Halo Hairs’ (Sheep and their husbandry), to ‘Quintessentially No. 8 (Adaptations, Innovations, Pests and Diseases’. These immediately impart the flavour of the book, and from then on in my case it was just a matter of dipping joyfully, finding words that I had never encountered before. I discovered to my surprise that the South Canterbury downlands where I lived as a child are described as downy country, and I loved the definition ‘career girl’ – a ewe that refuses to accept and feed her lamb, — and ‘nudists’ as a description of shorn sheep.
            Some of Bardsley’s introductory comments are particularly illuminating. She notes how New Zealand farmers have from the very early days identified entirely with their land and their stock, quoting Samuel Butler in the 1860s: ‘I was rather startled at hearing one gentleman ask another whether he meant to wash this year, and received the answer “No”. I soon discovered that his sheep are himself. If his sheep are clean, he is clean.’ And a description of a Manawatu farmer in 2004: ‘Farming at 300 metres above sea level, he is a late lamber.’ She also cites examples of rural words and phrases that have entered the wider New Zealand vernacular, such as ‘crack your whip’, ‘drag the chain’, or ‘flat to the boards’.
            Like Elizabeth Gordon in a more general context, Bardsley provides interesting evidence of the influence of Maori words on our rural language.  From the earliest days of colonial settlement these were bastardised, so ‘piripiri’ became ‘bidi-bidi’, ‘tumatakuru’ ‘matagouri’, and ‘tutu’ ‘toot’. Incidentally, I found it interesting that in her introduction she used the words ‘te reo’ in her running text with no attempt at definition. She is right to do so, although less than 10 years ago this would have been puzzling to the majority of pakeha New Zealanders.
            As might be expected the language of sheepdogs in the chapter entitled ‘Huntaways, Hoolers, and Half-day Dogs’ is particularly colourful. I liked the contemptuous ‘powder puff’ – a light, noisy dog; ‘shandygaff’, a cross between a huntaway and a heading dog, or ‘shingle-scratcher’ – a dog that makes a lot of noise but achieves little.
            I have a suspicion that with the increased mechanisation of modern farming, many of the words and phrases so laboriously collected by Bardsley for this compilation have already disappeared from the farmer’s daily lexicon. Whether this is true or not, we owe the author a debt of gratitude for collecting and annotating so minutely New Zealand’s rich heritage of rural language.
            I was working as an editor at A.H. & A.W. Reed in 1975, when A.W., as he was always called in the company (his uncle, A.H. Reed, was known as The Founder) quietly dropped on my desk a voluminous manuscript that later became the first edition of Place Names of New Zealand. It was always thus: A.W. would spend most of his days dealing with the multifarious matters associated with running a large publishing house, then two or three times a year submit yet another manuscript for consideration. We assumed that he seldom paused to eat and obviously never slept. In the case of Place Names, he had spent years collating and describing the names of our towns, settlements and geographical features, exploiting the resources of his vast library in his Wellington house.
            The book, as wily old A.W. already knew, became a bestseller, and he updated it before he died in 1979. A further edition, entitled The Reed Dictionary of New Zealand Place Names, was published in 2002 before this edition was published by Penguin in 2010, radically revised and enlarged by Peter Dowling, who thoroughly deserves to be named as a co-author of the work.
            I am not clear whether people from other countries share our passionate interest in the words and names unique to our own environment. When I lived in England for a number of years, ‘the natives’ (read Elizabeth Gordon on that incendiary word) never evinced much interest in the rich history associated with the place names of their country, whereas here you can always stimulate a healthy discussion if you mention Whanganui or even Aoraki-Mt Cook. Perhaps this reflects the need for a young society to identify and root itself in its environment, but for whatever reason, this latest edition of Place Names of New Zealand can be expected to sell even more successfully than its predecessors.
            The origin and meaning of New Zealand Place Names are of course what the book is all about. Not only do we want to know the meaning of the vast array of Maori place names in the pantheon, but also their origins and those of the European names bestowed upon our landmarks over the past two centuries. Dowling has added another 1500 entries to Reed’s most recent lists, bringing the total to over 10,000, and has revised and edited them to create a more disciplined and authoritative work. What I found particularly intriguing were the original Maori names for those places renamed during the nineteenth century.
            One is told these days that the publishing industry is experiencing hard times. It is encouraging to know that books such as Living Language continue to be published, and it is to be hoped that valuable reference works such as In the Paddock and on the Run and Place Names of New Zealand will always be available for scholars and general readers like.

DAVID ELWORTHY grew up on a South Canterbury farm; he published his first poems in Landfall in 1954. In 1984 he and his wife Ros Henry founded Shoal Bay Press, which they ran successfully until they sold the company to Longacre Press in 2004. He and Ros are the authors of the recently-published Edward’s Legacy: The Elworthys of South Canterbury.

Cross-currents: Seven Recent Poetry Collections

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David Eggleton
Mama Mortality Corridos, by Lisa Samuels (The Holloway Press, 2010), 54 pp., $200.00; Echolocation, by Angela Andrews (Victoria University Press, 2007), 56 pp, $25.00; Since June, by Louise Wallace (Victoria University Press, 2009), 64 pp, $25.00; Tapa Talk, by Serie Barford (Huia Press, 2007) 64 pp $ 22.00; Crumple, by Vivienne Plumb (Seraph Press, 2010), 80 pp.,$25.00; Time Traveller, by Robin Fry (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 2010), 80 pp., $28.00; Sleepwalking in Antarctica and Other Poems, by Owen Marshall (Canterbury University Press, 2010), 88 pp, $25.00.

Sigmund Freud suggested that dreaming is a form of writing; in Lisa Samuels’ poetry collection Mama Mortality Corridos, writing is a form of dreaming. Strumming the keyboard, she’s a virtuoso of the dream-song. On first encounter, the reader’s kept permanently off-balance by the dizzying run-on phrases, the racing pulse of the tempo, the vertiginous absence of referents that adhere. Page by page, she offers Rorschach blots of language, inviting us to tease out the enigmatic and the elliptical, not so much into narratives as into states of emotion. The meanings of her lines wriggle about like creatures escaping from a reptile zoo, scuttling into crevices with a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t quickness — skipping, that is to say, between possible interpretations.
            Mama Mortality Corridos is a fine-press limited edition, beautifully presented, and both designed and hand-printed by craft-printer Tara McLeod, who restores the status of the book to that of a tactile object, rich beneath one’s fingertips. Published by Auckland’s Holloway Press, it’s also distinguished in a New Zealand context by its use of American spellings — ‘labor’ — and by its implied American intonations, as well as by its incorporation of verse lines in Spanish, taken from the poetry of the Spanish Catholic mystic Saint Teresa of Avila.
            An established American poet who has been teaching at the University of Auckland since 2006, Lisa Samuels writes in an American transcendentalist tradition that takes in such contrarians as Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein and Kathy Acker. Language is placed in the service of assertions of selfhood and a feminist consciousness, but at the same time the notion of a single selfhood and a single centre of consciousness is undermined, or at least contested:
                       
                        The ground is a form of elliptical impediment
                        words like eye blinks . . .
                        your arms might be united
                        with the apples. the tables, greeting
                        clouds, the fabric
                        uttering over your head
                        soft rooms, the pillows of birds
                        in the leaf curtains . . .
                                    (‘And passing by a corner’)


            Imagistic, yet combining mixed pronouns, mixed dictions, and collage effects all the way, her poems are assemblages of echoes and glimpses, ever on the point of dissolution or dissonance, though never quite succumbing. Phrases fingerpost the ordinary business of ordinary lives: ‘our best meal’, ‘stolen . . . umbrella’, ‘bejewelled anatomy’, but Samuels programmatically unsettles any expectations of domestic dramas of the kitchen sink variety. One is reminded of assorted schools of hermeticism that have been and gone, and inevitably of the American ‘Language’ poets currently flourishing on academic creative writing course curriculums in the United States, with their manifesto-like, aggressive demonstrations of linguistic uncertainty theorems.
            This is a collection in which everything is happening in the continuous present, invoking Joycean stream-of-consciousness, and even Surrealism’s automatic writing — but a closer examination of poems suggest that the ‘accidental’ poem has in fact been carefully crafted. The ‘elliptical’, the savage phrasal cut-ups, may mimic the darting consciousness and irrational urges of subconscious impulses barely kept in check, but the closed circuits of these poems are also jolted by, and fizz with, acute verbal energies, which sustain their momentum through the ostensible knitting and unknitting of neuroses, their enactments of disorder, dysfunction, impenetrable solipsism and naked ideology.
            Not only do her lines invariably strike the ear harmoniously, but she also sustains the moodiness of her cadences — their weird, spectral emotionalism. Her word lists are intended to be ‘awkwardly/ pervasive’, to invoke the forbidden, a sense of taboo; but they do so in service of a scepticism about language’s capacity to transmit a dictionary exactness of meaning. This twitchy restlessness can produce obsessive dramatic monologues, such as the poem ‘Mouth’, with its implicit air of morbid eroticism: ‘Rain in my lover’s/ mouth as I hold it open.’ What jealous fit has led to this corpse-like moment, so reminiscent of Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’?
            To confirm that the sum total of this collection is all of a piece with the implicit fetishisation of literature the book itself insists on, one simply has to pull at any given thread of imagery, then trace it through. For Samuels, the medieval fervour of Catholic mysticism becomes, in our medicated era, the breathless fervour of belief in the polysemous text providing endless possibilities for ecstatic witnessing, with closure itself endlessly deferred. In other words, writing in a high style, employing a kind of abstract expressionism of language — ‘(Poetry) must be abstract,’ said Wallace Stevens — Samuels encourages us to surrender to the trance of syllables. For proof, examine the iterations of a motif word, such as ‘mouth’ — and associated mentions of air and breath — occurring in poem after poem: ‘the mouth becomes alive’, ‘air expands inside your chest’, ‘a cloud cover over her mouth’, ‘children go by every pore open, their mouths/ open’, ‘fresh circles around his mouth’, ‘the line of the mouth starts creeping suffused’, ‘mouths in a straight line’, ‘straight to her mouth’, and so on, as if words might indeed effect some ‘ransom of the flesh’, redeeming inevitable corporeal decay: a standard trope of metaphysical uplift in verse since the Elizabethans (think of Shakespeare’s Sonnets), and — more grotesquely — the Jacobeans.

***


 If, steeped in literary theory, Mama Mortality Corridos is an echo-locator of a certain kind, Echolocation, by Angela Andrews is a first collection with a different philosophical slant but some similar concerns. In this series of rites-of-passage poems, Andrews offers slices of life through veiled anecdotes that are always acoustically sensitive, often sounding out syllables with the cool precision of someone demonstrating piano scales. She recalls working as a medical intern at Grey Hospital on the West Coast, with its ‘rivers that swell like an anaphylactic throat/ and just as asphyxiating’ (‘Grey Hospital’). In another poem, she gestures at her state of pregnancy: ‘These fists and elbows/ are dodging your grip, won’t be described.’ (‘28 Weeks’). She writes also about growing up in Rotorua and Auckland with a matter-of-factness at once keen-eyed and keen-eared.
            Other poems deal with family displacement and migration. A Xmas tree is festooned with ‘lights from Holland’. Holland itself is a place constructed out of stories told by grandparents: ice-skating on a canal which is ‘a long tract of ice/. . . incising the horizon’ (‘Opa’); the Dutch language has the ‘intimacy/ of a chronic cough’ (‘Grandparents’); her grandmother’s baking offers ‘variations/ of cinnamon, butter and clove . . . covered in silver almonds’ (‘Oma’). Such familial unities link to life’s continuum of deaths and births, and her own training as a doctor; her father’s death from a heart attack is followed by the description of a heart sealed in perspex in a pathology museum.
            All in all, these are wry, understated, well-crafted and sharply observed poems that constitute a kind of ‘sentimental education’ in verse form.


 ***


If Angela Andrews has adopted a careful, watchful persona for her chronicle, in Since June, Louise Wallace, who, like Andrews is a recent graduate of the VUW creative writing course, chooses in her debut collection a more mercurial register. Her voice is by turns comic, knowing, tentative and questioning; and she constructs and draws our attention to her poems as potential try-outs for longer narratives, highlighting the investigative bravura of her inventions, which seem to be built up of conversational fragments, recollections, anecdotes and memos to self.
            They carry tonal echoes of their various locations — high school, the East Cape, Wellington — and feature a curious cast, including ‘gypsies’, ‘freaks’, a girl called Fanny Adams, the Poi Girls (‘They lean/ on the fence and watch you/ walk past — spinning, twirling their poi’). Here, semi-earnest, semi-comic, are the adventures and misadventures of childhood and adolescence, as well as a kind of sub-Gothic macabre that ranges from a missing cat to various phobias and uncertainties:
           
            My arms are outstretched, waiting
            for the ceiling to burst,
            the water to fall
            the current to show me
            the way . . . (‘The History of Water’)
           
            Her poems often have a spondaic lilt, a tripping quality, a raw-boned processional sense, as they attempt to pin down experience — or else to elude pinning down experience by focussing on what the pinning-down-with-a-poem process entails: ‘if you like the harmonica you keep on playing/ though it may seem a frivolous instrument to some’ (‘At the Impasse’).
            Everywhere, there are ghostly flickers and reflections resembling the self-image she glancingly sees reflected in the window on a long-distance bus-ride in winter; the ‘silvery-dead countryside/ whizzing by my window’ parallels an inner numbness, on a symbolic journey out of adolescent crisis and into a sense of responsibility and control.

***


 Serie Barford’s poems in Tapa Talk similarly share aspects of the confessional mode, but in a less occluded fashion, as she looks back on the identity crisis she experienced as a young Pacific Islander from a working-class background attending university. However, she is less looking back with nostalgia than interrogating her younger self — as well as the cultural attitudes of the 1970s — on her way towards constructing a personal ethnopoetics for the twenty-first century.
            She strives to be a seeker after the sonic resonances of tonal shifts between the Polynesian family of languages and the standard English inculcated in her through her education as a standard New Zealander.
            ‘The sun is one of our emotive nouns’, wrote W.H. Auden. Barford goes in search of the sun as a symbol, the way, for example, as time’s agent it cures skin like a hide, and the way it colours people into ethnic stereotypes. Skin blemishes are an identity marker:

            born the night of the comet
            my cousin’s child had
            birth marks like bruises
            with indistinct edges
                        (‘Mongolian Spots’)

            There’s a constant undertow, or undercurrent, of sensuality, too, in Barford’s musings, a haptic sense one might associate with hands-on tapa cloth making:

            all the paper in the village
            sweats with humidity
            resists ink and lead
            from hibiscus-coloured pens
                        (‘The Sabattier Effect’)

Emphatically chromatic — parrots have ‘scarlet splashes above their beaks/ as splendid as the dripping harlequin blooms’ (‘Rain on Ouvea’) — Barford triangulates the South Pacific, using Auckland as one corner as she travels between islands, to confirm a Polynesian identity, in which ripeness is all.

***


Vivienne Plumb, in her collection of poems entitled Crumple, is the epitome of the modern traveller, but one alert to contemporary life’s absurdist moments. Her poems about just passing through incorporate local colour, chance and the accidental, but also retail the arrival procedures and departure protocols that are the same everywhere. Somewhat like a wittily self-aware bag lady, her poems stack details up as if in a shopping trolley’s omnium gatherum.
            One poem details instructions given for minding her house while she’s away; another poem lists instructions received for gaining entry to various kinds of accommodation — in Poland: ‘Be careful on the apartment stairs in Blick Street/ there is no elevator and the lights will go out’. Her travels take in Sydney: ‘I used to live here on B. Street/ thirty-five years ago .  . .’; and Italy: ‘We do not have these shops at home’; China: ‘Shanxi/ smells of tea and yellow earth’; and Wellington: ‘Abandoned furniture sits at/ lonely intervals along the street’; and Rotorua: ‘The earth’s crust is so thin here/ and Rotorua you smell/ but I still love you, baby.’
            Hithering and thithering, indefatigably examining people, signage and happenings for poetic possibilities, Plumb ends up constructing an engaging, frequently amusing, occasionally ramshackle, assemblage of global flotsam and jetsam.

***


Robin Fry’s book of poems, Time Traveller, is rather more uneven, but a handful of poems are memorable — that is, they linger in the mind, neither inoffensive garden-variety tidy verses, nor offensive garden variety displays of unweeded emotion, but rather demonstrations of skillful formal execution and fertile invention. The rhapsodic ‘Hurry’ celebrates kissing with a kind of forlorn romantic echo reminiscent of a Leonard Cohen lyric: ‘kiss him before the agave blooms/ before the mistral blows’; while the poem entitled ‘Finding poems’ hints at self-mockery, even while it affirms the need for self-expression:

            Unseen behind a mountain hut,
            a tramper reaches in rapture
            towards the marbled sky,
            searches a pocket
            for the stub of pencil she
            usually keeps there . . .

            Poetry, Robin Fry, confirms, is a mansion with many rooms, many discourses — a site for inclusion rather than exclusion. Testing that humanist notion of permission, she delivers the linguistically permissive ‘Shipboard Romance’, a story told using an alphabetical acrostic. It’s another poem that seems in a hurry, but the point it makes is that a poem can use poetic licence to create its own logic, its own cycle of time:

            Able to please himself, he went from Alba to Cadiz
            boats were his passion, he would never fly . . .
            Zachariah ran to meet them with his girlfriend Anna.


***



Despite its title, Owen Marshall’s second collection of poems, Sleepwalking in Antarctica, is grounded in the South Island. He waxes lyrical over the Mainland’s high summer, the three shades of yellow found in flowering lupin, broom and gorse, respectively (‘Golden Age’), and is equally celebratory of mid-winter: the cat lifting its paws high, like a ‘Lipizzaner stallion’, as it crosses a frost-covered paddock; the effects of a snow storm on an old macrocarpa tree: ‘Boughs thicker than a rugby waist tore/ and snapped.’

            All manner of things entrance him, from coastal drizzle’s ‘drifting dewy breath’, to sparrows roosting in a tree outside his office window, but these ‘things’ are not random, rather they are the occasion for epiphanies, fables, moments of illumination.
            Marshall fossicks for axioms and truths amongst everyday encounters and events in order to craft poems as exquisite as top-shelf miniatures or cross-hatched thumb-nail sketches. Writing about his visit to Antarctica in January 2010, his concern is less with the great white wonder without than with how people interact with one another within the local watering hole, before ‘emerging at midnight into blinding/ sun.’
            Poems about a medical examination, his father, his brother, his uncle, his own exploits as a callow boy in the manner of callow boys the world over suggest the collection could be seen as the masculinist poems of a Southern man — ‘The taste of chlorine as/ smooth promise on a young woman’s skin’ — but if the poetic rhetoric is delivered from a male perspective, it only points to a more sophisticated or more subtle purpose, one imbued with an understanding of the human comedy, as the poem ‘Five Dreams for Freud’ confirms:

            I am to sing for President Reagan . . .
            I horseback a Kalahari pygmy child . . .
            I am running against the hurricane . . .
            I am facing armed assassins . . .
            with a toilet duck . . .
            I announce the discovery of
            a new primary colour . . .

Marshall’s poems are acts of self-interrogation, or perhaps self-recognition, which end up providing if not credos then catechisms. He is a scrupulous Everyman, one setting the points and confirming the calibrations on a personal moral compass, even as he swiftly sketches rich character studies in a handful of lines.
            The last poem in his collection, ‘Ending with Shakespeare’ is a character study of an elderly and ill South African academic who has ended up in New Zealand. It’s a kind of obituary, but it’s told in Marshall’s characteristic elegiac tone of voice as a poker-faced game of literary allusions. Thus, the droll humour serves to reveal a communality: the narrator watches as the hospital ward lights go out to the booming echoes of the English poetry canon recited by a dying man. The psychoanalysis is in the poetry.

DAVID EGGLETON is the editor of Landfall Review Online. His most recent poetry collection, Time of the Icebergs, was published by Otago University Press in 2010.