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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

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.

Summer’s Last Cicada

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David Herkt
Campana To Montale: Versions From the Italian, by Kendrick Smithyman, edited by Jack Ross and Marco Sonzogni (Edizione Joker – Transference series, 2010) 244 pp., $35.00.

Translation is a loaded literary subject. The transmutation of a poem, from one language to another, is a fraught act, and the status of a translated poem seems, if possible, even more problematic. It is also clear from the outset that Kendrick Smithyman’s translations from Italian, by a New Zealand poet who did not speak Italian, are a very special case. Campana To Montale: Versions From the Italian contains 211 poems by fourteen Italian modernist poets, ranging from the troubled isolate Dino Campana to Nobel laureate Salvatore Quasimodo, rendered into English by Smithyman. These ‘versions’, as he preferred to call them, were mainly the products of his late career, and many were completed after his retirement from the University of Auckland in 1987.
            The initial impulse seems to have been Smithyman’s dissatisfaction with some literal translations by Mary and Walter de Rachewiltz in a 1968 dual Italian/English issue of Poetry Australia (22/23), which he read in the early 1980s. However, his first ‘I could do better’ response to the clumsiness he perceived went far beyond a case of simple dismissal. It would play a role in more than a decade of his life.

            No other New Zealand poet has had such a substantial involvement with European poetry or with poets writing in another language. While the first step might have been the product of a momentary reaction, it is evident that the following engagement was anything but haphazard. As observed by Jack Ross in his introduction to Campana to Montale, the project became a ‘nightmare of industry’. For each of the chosen poems, Smithyman typed out the Italian text with a literal translation underneath and dictionary definitions down the side. This first page, in turn, was succeeded by a second with an initial English version, which was furthered worked to hone meaning, and produce line-breaks and scansion.
            Smithyman ended up translating nearly half of Salvadore Quasimondo’s complete output — 132 out of 195 poems — as well as large chunks of Eugenio Montale and Sandro Penna. They were accompanied by smaller selections from the works of other poets which, in sum, constitute a complete overview of the modernist poetic movement in Italy.
            Campana To Montale is a substantial and noteworthy addition to the corpus of Italian poetry in English. It is focused, yet comprehensive within those bounds. It gives a clear insight into more than half a century of writing. It is not the work of a dilettante. But Smithyman’s texts also produce far more questions than have been answered, even in the excellent essays by Ross and Marco Sonzogni that introduce and accompany the Edizione Joker edition. 
            Was such a labour really the product of a casually caused reaction? Was Smithyman’s involvement with Italian modernist poetry and poetics merely a matter of chance? Was it sustained purely by a hunt-and-peck exercise in dictionary translation much like doing a cryptic crossword in two languages? No matter how beguiling these questions might be, currently we have no real answers beyond the body of work. And such questions also avoid an obvious observation: these poems are some of Smithyman’s finest work.
            Evaluation of a poet’s oeuvre is not something that comes immediately. Things need time to settle. In Smithyman’s case this is further compounded by sheer volume. His self-selected Collected Poems (now easily accessible in toto, via: http://www.smithymanonline.auckland.ac.nz/) number some 1500 poems, even with the exclusion of ‘several hundreds’, some previously published.
            The place of the translations of Campana To Montale in this extensive output would initially appear minor — but for their outstanding quality. They have now been published in two countries: from The Writer’s Group in Auckland, New Zealand in 2004 and, in 2011, from Edizione Joker in Novi Ligure, Italy. They cannot be easily shuttled to the secondary place we so frequently reserve for a poet’s translations.
            In contradistinction to Smithyman’s vastly referential middle and late works, these translations are rich with deceptively simple wonders, stripped down to the bare bones, often stark, but always vivid.  There is, to take the most obvious example, ‘The Eel’:

            The eel, siren
            of the chill seas, quits the Baltic
            making for our seas,
            our estuaries, our rivers,
            flogging through the deeps, below the unfriendly flood
            from branch to branch and then
            from creek to stream, now waterways spreading like hairs,
            always pushing on further, into the very heart
            of the rock, slimed fine and easing
            through muddy creases . . .
                                                              (Eugene Montale: ‘The Eel’/’L’anguilla’)

            It is one of any number of eye-blinkingly good versions in Campana to Montale:

            Green on an unmoving sea, 
            islands where I used to live.

            Dried weeds, marine fossils,
            the beach where in their mating season sped
            horses of volcanoes and the moon . . .
                                                         (Salvadore Quasimondo: ‘Moon Horses and Volcanos’/   
            ‘Cavalli di luna e di vulcani’)

These translations encompass a wide range of poets and their responses to a world. There are the melancholy gay observations of Sandro Penna:

            Shadow of a light-footed cloud
            led me to a boy
            who came up from the fast-running river
            to stretch out naked on the grass . . .
                                                      (Sandro Penna, Untitled, L’ombra di una nuvola… , p. 52)

And Guiseppe Ungaretti’s almost-imagist, broken syntaxed condensations:

            A whole night long
            cast down beside,
            to
                 a mate butchered
            there
                             with his insulted mouth
            turned to the full moon
                             with the congestion
            of his hands
            making their way
            into my silence,
                          I have written
            letters full of love.
                                                 (Guiseppe Ungaretti: ‘The Vigil of Ungaretti’/‘Veglia’)

             Smithyman’s Italy is a locale of sharp images, taut phrases, and hard-edged summer light. At times, these translations have an almost cinematic quality. Shores are moon-crazed. Horizons withdraw. Anguish bursts into flame. In tone, they are often compressed and dramatic action-epics. Strangely, too, these poems are often not so much translated into English as they are transferred into a very New Zealand vernacular.
            They are filled with words and locutions like: ‘shelter-belt’, ‘the wind bares the kids’ submissive heads’, ‘our gullies’, ‘a mate butchered’, ‘the sun now wallops them’ – and the redolent ‘We shall have to put away the beach gear’. The recognitions by a New Zealand reader are unending. At times, it is almost as if we are exploring a great body of previously undiscovered New Zealand verse. They show us ourselves in a strange but very beguiling mirror. They make us ache for more translations by other New Zealand poets, granting us something most other cultures have experienced in full, a poetry enriched by exterior views painstakingly framed in a local perspective.
            Again, the position of Campana To Montale in Smithyman’s poetic career comes to the foreground. They are anomalous in his works and they force us to examine his own decisions in his own poetry, multifaceted as it was. It is possible to see them as a bright lance into ‘what could have been’, if Smithyman had not been dominated by the consequences of the nationalist project that had governed a century of New Zealand poets and poems. Their condensation, set against the sprawl of Smithyman’s own productions, the intensity of their vision, the multiple viewpoints, their tautness, and the lick and the turn of their relished language, all take these poems a long way from the discursive baseline of a late modern and early postmodern antipodean tradition.
            They inevitably produce a readerly desire that Smithyman had proceeded their way, rather than to the dead-ended, sometimes bloated, frequently derivative, and ultimately provincial gaze that is so evident in the exactly contemporaneous Atua Wera and Imperial Vistas Family Fictions, immense enterprises though they are. It is even possible to suggest, paradoxically, that the traditionally regarded bonds of translation here represent freedom for Smithyman: freedom from a nation at the back end of nowhere, freedom from an insular subject and inwardly turned received poetics, and freedom, ultimately, from himself.
But finally, it is their quality and power that should be our focus. In a century of poet’s translations, from Pound to Lowell to Heaney, Smithyman more than holds his space. His recreation of the poetry of another nation is alluring. His ‘nightmare of industry’ is successful. The works remain vividly in mind. The relocation of the poems by the translator is exactly achieved.
            It is to our benefit that these versions exist, but it is also our loss that Smithyman could not finally transfer this marvellously attained achievement to benefit his own self-authored works. This world of ‘could-have-been’ – compact, compressed, vibrant, and profound – must stand as one of the great lessons of late twentieth-century New Zealand poetry.


DAVID HERKT is a television director and researcher. A collection of his poetry, The Body of Man, was published by Hazard Press.

Siege Symphony

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Graeme Lay
The Conductor, by Sarah Quigley (Vintage, 2011), 303 pp., $39.99.

Sarah Quigley’s fourth novel opens with a small but ominous harbinger. In the spring of 1941, the renowned Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich is informed by his friend, music teacher Ivan Sollertinsky, that two German diplomats have cancelled suit orders with Leningrad’s most reputable tailor. The signal is significant – as the German diplomats are leaving the city and returning to Berlin, it seems that the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 is about to collapse. After it does, in mid-summer 1941, the Germans invade the Soviet Union and lay siege to Leningrad, bringing ghastly privations to the city’s civilian population.
       Within this hideous environment Shostakovich (1906-1975) composes his Seventh Symphony, a personal magnum opus which will be broadcast by the Soviet authorities in order to sustain the morale of the population. Shostakovich has for some time had an uneasy relationship with Stalin’s regime, but is tolerated because of his popularity with the people. As Sollertinsky remarks to Shostakovich, after the composer has called him a ‘masterful dissembler’: ‘We both know that dissemblers live longer than dissidents’.

           Karl Eliasberg, the unmarried conductor of the below-par Leningrad Radio Orchestra, lives in an apartment with his nagging, petulant mother. He worships Shostakovich, who is everything he is not. Eliasberg is an insecure loner whose own musicians barely tolerate him. Neurotic and a stammerer, he seems incapable of conducting even a Leningrad tramcar.  Closer to Shostakovich is violinist Nikolai Nikolayev, a widower and father of a beloved nine-year-old, Sonya, a promising cellist. Another precious possession of the Nikolayev family is Sonya’s cello, a Storioni, which the girl plays during her birthday celebrations, drawing sincere praise from Shostakovich.
       The siege intensifies. Leningrad is garrotted by the German Army and blitzed mercilessly by the Luftwaffe. Although most of the city’s leading musicians are evacuated to the Far East of the USSR, Shostakovich stays, digging ditches and fire-watching from the rooftops by day, then working through the night on his symphony. Barely tolerated by Nina, his long-suffering wife, he subsists on bread, vodka and cigarettes.
          Dread sets in among Leningrad’s citizens, who know that the bitter winter is looming. The city’s children, including Sonya, are evacuated by train to the countryside. This causes anguish for Nikolai, whose grief becomes unbearable when he hears that the train his young daughter was on has been bombed and derailed by the Germans.
     Under the most constrained of circumstances, Shostakovich labours on with his composition, shutting himself away in his room and cutting himself off from the demands of his family. Close to despair, the composer wonders, ‘When would life stop getting in the way of music?’ At the same time, poor Eliasberg tries to cope with his rebellious orchestra as well as the querulous demands of his mother.
       While the siege, the bitter winter and starvation beset Leningrad’s inhabitants, the novel’s central characters – Shostakovich, Eliasberg and Nikolayev – confront their various demons. Shostakovich wonders if he can possibly finish his symphony. Even sheet paper on which to write his score is almost unobtainable. Nikolayev grieves for his lost daughter, painfully regretful that he ever sent her away. His sister, Tanya, threatens to barter Sonya’s priceless cello for food. Eliasberg struggles to cope with his disintegrating orchestra, whose oboeist, Alexander, is openly contemptuous of him.
        The privations of the people of Leningrad have become so extreme that even the corpses of the dead are stripped for food. The horrors of the siege, the wrecking of innocent bodies and the desperation of people driven to live like foraging animals is vividly evoked. Eliasberg is close to despair: ‘In the long winter weeks that followed, he crawled through the days half-blinded by grief and rage. The frozen city splintered under the German shells, and bodies piled up at the sides of Nevsky Prospect. Stick-thin women stumbled to the Neva and drew water through holes drilled in the ice. Because Elias’s vision was failing, he tried to make sense of the disintegrating world by listening to it. What sounds did he hear? The grating of sled-runners loaded with corpses. Huge explosions as mass burial pits were created with dynamite. The howls of stray dogs and cats, slaughtered by Leningraders desperate for meat’.
       When Eliasberg is able to provide a grateful Shostakovich with score paper, the conductor comes closer to his hero. The Soviet authorities then arrange for Shostakovich and his family to be evacuated, taking them far from the conflict so that Dimitri can finish his composition. Completed from afar, the score is flown over the German lines and back into Leningrad. Now it is over to Eliasberg and his pitiful orchestra to rehearse, and eventually perform Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony.
            Unexpectedly but heroically, Eliasberg rises to this extreme challenge. Freed from the hungry clutches of his mother, supported by a lovely, wounded ballerina, Nina Bronnikova, he overcomes his self-pity, learns to love and be loved, and becomes resolute in his determination to do justice to the composer he so admires. Shostakovich now being off-stage, Eliasberg moves to the forefront of the narrative and justifies his role in capturing the novel’s title.
          With its assured characterisation and trenchant dialogue, and informed by the author’s musical background (Quigley has played cello herself), The Conductor’s narrative begins slowly but gathers movement, momentum and intensity. The sometimes bitchy world of the professional musician provides a chorus to the story. Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky come in for some scathing comments, and even the master, Shostakovich himself, is accused by Eliasberg at one stage of ‘referencing other works’, in the Russian’s case, Ravel. The novel then builds to a tantalising crescendo in which the final movement – the broadcast of the symphony – is delectably anticipated. Eliasberg is on the podium.
        ‘When he cranes slightly forward, he can see a row of microphones pointed like guns towards the stage, ready to catch the Leningrad Symphony and broadcast it to the world. He takes a deep breath and steps into the blaze of electric light, far brighter than any sun. Sweat leaps on his back, the orchestra rises to its feet, and the audience also stands, a dark gleaming mass of military badges and medals, and pearls.’ Art is about to triumph over war, death and destruction.
          There are a few jarring notes in The Conductor. Characters bite their lips, tongues, and roll their eyes, rather too frequently, while the use of the contemporary words ‘recycled’ and ‘inappropriate’ are out of register for scenes occurring in 1942. But these are relatively minor linguistic quibbles.
             Originally from Christchurch, the recipient of a Buddle Findlay Sargeson fellowship in 1998 and the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers Residency in 2000, Quigley has lived in Berlin for the past eleven years. This European experience has been put to good use. The Conductor is by any standards a remarkable novel. Works of fiction depicting classical music and musicians are notoriously difficult to transfer to the pages of a novel, yet by credibly transforming Eliasberg from underdog to hero, Quigley succeeds in validating the conductor’s veneration of Shostakovich and at the same time provides the novel with a hearteningly upbeat conclusion. And to fill any imaginative musical vacuums from which the reader may suffer, the novel comes with a CD of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony.  Ambitious in its conception and stunningly executed, The Conductor is a work of truly international stature. 


GRAEME LAY is an Auckland-based reviewer, writer and editor. His recent books include the non-fiction work In Search of Paradise: Artists and Writers in the Colonial South Pacific and the novel Alice & Luigi.