Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

Roundabout: Catching Up with Some Recent New Zealand Poetry Collections

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David Eggleton
A Long Girl Ago, by Johanna Aitchison (Victoria University Press), 2007, $25.00; Museum of Lost Days, by Raewyn Alexander (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop), 2008, $15.00; Liquefaction, by Iain Britton (Interactive Press), 2009, AUS $25.00; Self-titled, by Tony Chad (HeadworX), 2006, $24.95; How to live by the sea, by Lynn Davidson (Victoria University Press), 2009, $25.00; Overnight Downpour, by Andrew Fagan (HeadworX) 2006, $19.99; Geography for the Lost, by Kapka Kassabova (Auckland University Press), 2007, $24.99; Etymology, by Bryan Walpert (Cinnamon Press), UK £7.99.

T.S. Eliot described poetry as ‘the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings’, and words themselves as things that ‘slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision’. Good poets are not so much punch-drunk on language as wary of it, like recovering alcoholics, and however chatty or conversational the voice of the poet, it is only ever offering a persona made of language, with claims of clarity, accessibility, or indeed hermeticism, just strategic devices. Contemporary poets strain their ears to catch the silences between ‘noise’ and bring us word of them — in the form of Chinese whispers, or Russian dolls, or Zen paradoxes, or Kiwi minimalism.
            Joanna Aitchison spent three years teaching in Japan, and some of her poems in A Long Girl Ago show how English-as-a-second-language speakers, tone-deaf to idiomatic subtleties, can twist and wrench her mother-tongue into a kind of karaoke, chanting odd cadences in a kind of sing-song, and thereby creating new meanings. These word-benders, with their ultra-groovy phrasemaking, gift her with pop imagery, often highly comic and colourful.

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Tigers & Worms

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Cy Mathews
Tigers at Awhitu, Sarah Broom (Auckland University Press, 2010), 80 pp., $29.95 The Worm in the Tequila, Geoff Cochrane (Victoria University Press, 2010), 95 pp., $25.00

Does lyric poetry spring from calm and contentment, or agitation and unease? Adverse circumstances and events can certainly provoke powerful creative responses; it is probably unsurprising then that the experience of physical or mental illness has resulted in many compelling literary works. Sarah Broom’s Tigers at Awhitu and Geoff Cochrane’s The Worm in the Tequila both emerge from such experiences, evoking and – eventually – moving beyond them in very different ways.
            Sarah Broom is a relative newcomer to New Zealand poetry (Tigers at Awhitu is her first collection of poetry; a scholarly work, Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, was published in the UK in 2005). Her book is divided into two untitled sections: the first part written before the author’s diagnosis of terminal cancer (which is now in remission), and dealing with a variety of lyrical and narrative subjects; the second written after the diagnosis. Many of the poems in the first section are cool and spare with vivid imagery and stand-alone lines used for blunt impact, while other somewhat denser poems establish a more prosaic pace. ‘Crusade’ is an especially powerful example of the first type, its opening question – ‘And I wondered what kind of a thing the soul was’ – leading, after six lines of rhetorical speculation, to the climax:
                        Or the death rattle
                        of a coin belt ripped
                        from the waist of a dying man.
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Wax-spotted, Burnt and Scorched

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Helen Watson-White
Reading on the Farm: Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World, Lydia Wevers (Victoria University Press, 2010), 344 pp., $40.00
 
‘I suffer from an illness, an illness which has no cure, no limit and no end.  It’s compulsive, expensive, consuming and addictive, it fills my house and my life and my time…’

In her 2004 essay ‘On Reading’, Lydia Wevers identifies what was described in Fraser’s Magazine  in 1847 as ‘book-love’: the passion that drives (it seems) everyone’s purpose as well as her own in this study of a colonial library. Reading on the Farm presents a richly detailed record of nineteenth-century life at the Beetham family’s Brancepeth Station in the Wairarapa — and by implication, in colonial New Zealand generally. Wevers’s story-telling style mixes the personal and the academic in a way that should appeal to a wide readership of bibliophiles.
This is not, however, a straightforward read, an invitation to nostalgia; it is an appreciation but also a critique. The illustrations, for instance, are as important as in any social history — fixing impressions, establishing place and time — but some of their ramifications are realised only when you’ve taken in the text. In its need to interpret puzzling visual signs, what sets out to be an academic monograph (with excellent notes, index, bibliography) assumes the intriguing character of a murder mystery.

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Light-sensitive

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David Eggleton
Artists @ Work: New Zealand Painters and Sculptors in the Studio, Richard Wolfe and Stephen Robinson (Penguin, 2010), 224 pp., $72.00

Developed from a concept initiated by photographer Stephen Robinson, this book documents the creative processes of twenty-four artists within their native habitats. The selected assortment ranges far and wide nationally, though only one Maori artist is included and there are no Polynesian artists, or indeed other non-Pakeha artists, while the media synchronicities which characterise the twenty-first century are signalled with the listing at the back of the book of relevant dealer gallery websites.
         Each artist is allocated a self-contained chapter within which writer Richard Wolfe asks sensible questions and elicits illuminating answers. This well-designed book shows us what goes on behind the white cube as it were, with artists for the most part offering succinct summaries of what they do as they wield the tools of their trade and knock out artworks in idiosyncratic spaces.
         John Reynolds suggests that the artist’s studio is ‘just the roof over the head of the bigger picture’, and gesturing around his newish studio located adjacent to his home states that ‘the studio is in the head and this is just a workspace.’ But if he argues for ‘a studio that functions as a machine’, other artists declare a more organic allegiance.

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Classic Review from 1961, by R.A. Copland

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R. A. Copland
Each month we will publish a review from a past issue of Landfall. This month’s review is from Landfall 57, published in March 1961 under the editorship of Charles Brasch. It is by R.A. Copland, then lecturing in English at the University of Canterbury.

Some are Lucky, Phillip Wilson. Denis Glover. 14s. 6d.
 
These are stories of New Zealand men who in the middle of the twentieth century are still ‘living on their lonesome’. The condition is mainly psychological, and though ‘Some Are Lucky’ – that is, some have come to terms, however uneasy, with themselves and with their lot – many remain as aliens in their own land. This emotional cloud hovers over the central clearing of each story in which the characters’ movements are carefully reported and the detail of their various trades faithfully documented. Since there is a vast amount of detail, topographical, botanical, social and occupational, which is peculiar to this country, Mr Wilson’s stories have a strongly indigenous quality; and even if one feels that he occasionally leans far out to seize the local name or the local object there can be no denying the toughness and solidity of his surfaces.
Mr Wilson’s accuracy in observation is of the ear as well as of the eye, and he catches the sound of our speech, sometimes with extraordinary precision. This is more notable in the narrative prose than in the dialogue itself. For example, the narrative prose of ‘Too Many Sheep’ is as delicately attuned to New Zealand intonations as anything ever written in this country. Consider the words ‘just’ and ‘hop’ in the following:
Got a temper like a child of six, the kind that is just uncontrollable. Dad was leaning   
against the rail of the yards, and when he saw Andrews hop out of the car he      
straightened up and stared at him.
And this sentence:
Well, Andrews installed his tribe and soon all the barbed wire fences for miles 
 around seemed to be hung out with washing and babies’ naps.

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Parish Moments

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Robert McLean
Cornelius & Co: Collected Working-class Verse 1996—2009, John O’Connor (Post Pressed, Queensland, Australia, 2010), 144 pp., $25.00.
John O’Connor is a Christchurch poet who has had eight books of poetry published. His most recent book is Cornelius & Co: Collected Working-class Verse 1996–2009, a sizable (144 pages) selection of previously published and new poems that are more or less in keeping with the qualification of the collection’s title.

            Is there irony in its tub-thumping title? The distinction between verse — often skating close to doggerel and to which is usually appended the qualifier ‘light’ — and poetry — assumed to be a far more serious proposition — amounts to one between low-brow ‘popular’ entertainment and high-brow diversions of the intelligentsia: not a realistic or clearly delineated division, but the tension generated by that division provides much of the energy crackling in these poems.
Whilst the poems in this book are derived from O’Connor’s lived experience – as a boy growing up in an Irish-Catholic household and parish; as a resident of the suburb of Addington; and as a taxi driver encountering smudged, damaged, or yobbish ‘characters’ – the experiences are treated with forensic detachment. There is a fierce and committed intelligence invested in these poems, which offer sharply-drawn characterisations, compassionate detachment, keen humour – and an uncompromising adherence to highly theoretical principles of composition that sometimes clash with or spark off the intransigent events on which they have been brought to bear.

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