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Landfall Review Online: Aotearoa New Zealand books in review

Sense and Sensibility

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

‘Regarde. — Colette’s last word.’      
            This brief entry from one of Elizabeth Smither’s commonplace books might be the watchword of her volume. In her response to this quotation, she defines the meaning for her: ‘Regarde — to look, feel, wonder, accept, live.’ Another entry from the same commonplace book a few pages later complements this one: ‘Try to become someone on whom nothing is wasted. Henry James, advice to writers’. (Actually this is probably a misremembered version of James’s dictum from his 1884 essay, ‘The Art of Fiction’: ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost’).  Smither’s interpretation is that James ‘is recommending a training for our senses, so that what we notice is observed in detail and subtlety’. Earlier in the same commonplace book a quotation from Junot Diaz at the 2008 Writers & Readers Festival in Auckland expresses a related idea: ‘Sometimes the thing you have to do is become the person that you need to be, to write the book that you want to write’. Smither’s response to this is metaphorical:
I’ve always profoundly believed that the presence of the writer is inevitably contained in the work just as the fingerprints of a burglar, who has forgotten to wear gloves, are left on the windowsill he has just escaped through. The critic or the constable arrives with the dusting powder and Voila! A good thumbprint where he levered up the latch or a middle finger on the glass. The style we write in reflects our character.
            Her interpretations of the three quotations all point to the idea that the trained personal sensibility of the writer who looks, feels, wonders, accepts or notices and intuits a significance in what he or she sees will be evident in the writing that emerges from the experience, as individual as fingerprints.
            Smither’s own fingerprints are all over The Commonplace Book. Her distinctive personal sensibility – quick, alert, curious, intellectual, aesthetic – is expressed not only in the style of her comments, but in the quotations she chooses, in the range of subject and feeling and concept that is found in them, in the things she looks at and the way she interprets them, and in the distinctive genre she has invented for the book. That genre is neither the notebook nor the diary nor the traditional commonplace book, but a combination of all of them.  She has taken three of her commonplace books, ‘collection(s) of miscellaneous quotations extracts, pensées’, and made a ‘journey’ through them by flicking through and selecting entries that spoke to her at the moment and interspersing ‘suppositions, incidents, memories springing from the entries themselves’. She has made a personal selection from three personal collections and used those items as springboards for a variety of personal responses. Some of those responses are like diary entries, some are poems, some are anecdotal narratives, some are miniature personal essays, some are small pieces of subjective literary criticism. All carry the marks of her sensibility.
Readers of the novels The Sea Between Us and Lola, with their sequences about life in fine hotels, will see their basis in Smither’s own taste and experiences; shown in her  response to a quotation from Hilary Mantel concerning the desirability of writers when they travel overseas going first-class and staying in ‘the best hotels’ – an agreement on the necessity of ‘short periods of luxury for authors to preserve their equilibrium and sanity.  Only the best and most stylish hotel will do’.  Her response then segues into accounts of her most pleasant experiences at literary festivals held in hotels in Melbourne and in Spain.  Responses to other quotations lead to anecdotes from other recurrent experiences of the social side of literary life at poetry readings and book launches, including her own dislike of filling in the time at a lecture and reading by giving ‘a little of the background’ of the poems she reads, ‘as if each should-be-able-to-stand-on-its-own-feet poem needed a little autobiographical note the way a woman needs a purse’.
Many entries deal with the the writing process. The phrase from one of her poems, ‘Oh quick is my favourite word’, leads to a confession that she has ‘always been in love with speed, swiftness, ardour’, so that in writing a poem ‘There has to be the rush of words, the attempt to impress, to pull something off, something scattered and only half-thought-out. (I must think on my feet, metaphorically, as my hand scribbles)’. In several entries she contrasts the rapidity of composition with the painstaking slowness of proofreading, and her routine of taking breaks and rewarding herself in order to be able to keep going at it reminds me of the rituals I used to have for getting through a pile of Bursary examinations to mark. Editing she likewise describes as being painful:

as if … as if … three times it appears on the same page and two will have to be throttled and their carcasses thrown into a ditch. ‘Kill your darlings’ and it feels like Sophie’s Choice. The very best sentences are guillotined and protest.
  
             But there is satisfaction at the end of the process when that ‘something’ that ‘may be stirring . . . somewhere below the surface’ of a novel becomes visible: ‘Later, when all the cutting, rewriting and removal of red clothes is complete, this mystery may be revealed: a strange sense of unknown things joining up, claiming a kinship (and giving your work a structure) you had never expected to find.’  In a response to a quotation from Fra Mauro, cartographer to the court of Venice – ‘What wisdom is acquired during the course of a life is the result of the mind’s tenderness towards the heart’ – she describes the process of editing Lola, weeks with ‘my mind definitely not showing a trace of kindness towards my heart, which was merely required to go on beating’.  It took a ‘Marie Curie revival meal’ of ‘a little steak and pommes frites’ with a glass of red wine, followed by a chocolate brownie and a liqueur for her to recover.  However, looking back at the experience she can say, ‘now I can admit I enjoyed it, the way a minister of war might enjoy going into a bunker’.
That metaphor for her feelings is very suggestive, as are many of her images.  She has a simile for metaphors in her response to Diane Wakosi’s lines about metaphor – ‘I never know  how far / for the sake of wisdom / to carry a metaphor’:
 When I am mentoring I advise against lines too packed (like suitcases with some of the contents bulging out under the straps). It may be that the poet, through practice, has first to unpack. To sort through images like old clothing, familiar, comfortable, no longer fresh or co-ordinated, but put on almost in the manner of prejudices.
Such practical criticism is not reserved for those she is mentoring. One entry opens with a quotation from a letter by Lloyd Jones about how he is ‘trying to overcome the tyranny of narrative and dig down into moments that may or may not be connected or only connected because I have wilfully placed them side by side.’ The letter leads Smither to look at the way Katherine Anne Porter in ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’ moves into ‘deeper preoccupations’ than plot and to conclude with a tribute to ‘the marvellous Marilynne Robinson whose Gilead and Home recreate moments of such frustration and tension and grace you feel the whole of human nature is located in a shabby old-fashioned kitchen in a parsonage in Iowa’.
 Many other themes that also occur in the poetry and fiction appear in The Commonplace Book. In two entries concerning Terry Sturm, Smither bring together some of her own ‘deeper preoccupations’ – friendship, death (often linked with it for one of her generation and mine), literature and its value, imagination.  The first, a diary entry for 25 May 2009 early in the book, is her response to receiving the news of his death. She remembers her positive contacts with his human warmth, and pays tribute to his ‘truly fine intellect, founded not in egoism but in care, accuracy, and a great ability to think’ so that he could patiently work to find ‘the nearest we can come to truth’, whether in literary judgement or in human relations. The second, late in the book, is a meditative reading of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’: ‘Terry‘s favourite poem, fixed to the fridge’, the poem that had been read at his funeral, a poem ‘inexhaustible, beyond explanation, but not beyond comfort’, that tells us that ‘Existence, with imagination, is enough’.
In The Commonplace Book Elizabeth Smither, as she has done in her poems, her short stories and her novels, has found an appropriate vehicle for expressing her unique sensibility. She has left her fingerprints on another kind of fine verbal object.

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

Drum Rhythms

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Sarah Jane Barnett
A Canoe in Midstream: Poems New & Old, by Apirana Taylor (Canterbury University Press, 2009), 168 pp., $25.00

At a hefty one hundred and sixty eight pages, Apirana Taylor’s fifth volume of poetry brings together new work with previously published poems. Taylor is a poet and short story writer who also writes for children and theatre. With a background in drama, much of his work has appeared in multimedia recordings. Taylor first’s collection Eyes of the Ruru was published in 1972, and it launched his voice onto the New Zealand poetry landscape. Critics have called his poetry everything from ‘raging’ to ‘meditative’. Of Maori and Pakeha descent, with affiliation to Ngati Porou, Te Whanau-a-Apanui and Ngati Ruanui, his style is often contrasted with the fluid lyricism of Hone Tuwhare.
            Taylor’s poetic style is that of simplicity. The majority of poems in A Canoe in Midstream are short and have minimal punctuation. Only a handful of poems span more than a page. The collection encompasses themes of humanity’s relationship with nature, love, life, death and magic. In Taylor’s poems, land and people are the same: the ‘mountain [has] bones’, and people are made of tree buds. One reading of the collection is that of a catalogue or celebration of New Zealand’s natural wonders: stones, flesh, morepork, totara, rimu and kahikatea; storms and islands.
            Taylor’s poems also talk about the impact of colonisation and urbanisation on Maori. At times the poems come across as angry, and with a bitter aftertaste (which is not unjustified). In his most well-known poem, ‘Sad Joke on a Marae’, the speaker, ‘Tu the freezing worker’, calls ‘Ngati D.B.’ his tribe. Taylor gives Tu this depressing mihi, and in this poem, and the other poems that hint at drunkenness and violence in Maori communities, it is difficult to tell if Taylor is sympathising with his characters or scolding them.
            Other poems have tones of retribution, such as the poem, ‘The Womb’, where the voice of the land says: ‘you settlers and farmers / return to me / and I suck on your bodies / as if they are lollipops.’ Many poems are written in Maori, which may be one of the ways Taylor honours and acknowledges his ancestry. In ‘Maori Girl’, ‘The ghosts of your ancestors tap on your / shoulders’, and I wonder if Taylor’s poems are meant to inspire Maori to discover their roots. Many retell Maori history, such as the poems ‘Kapiti’ about Te Rauparaha, and ‘Parihaka’. For Taylor all is not lost: faith wells in these poems. The poem ‘Whakapapa’ is an encouraging retelling of the Maori creation myth, and ‘God’ appears often as a comfort. In some poems, such as ‘Charteris Bay’, a gentler and lyrical style emerges:
        the inlet turned
            the languid colour of pea green soup

            lunch flowered into
            fine wine salad talk and t’ai chi …
            the day closed
            diamonds of sunlight danced across the water.

         The influence of music is clear in the drum rhythms of Taylor’s work. His poetry displays a delight in sound, repetition and patterns. The best draw image and sound together, such as the poem ‘Listen’:
        Listen to the tap tap tap
            of the carvers
            as with chisel and mallet
            they trace their genealogy.

         When performing, Taylor combines his poetry with Maori and Western instruments. Many of the poems in A Canoe in Midstream may be better suited to performance, where Taylor’s personality and presence could lift them from the page. For example the poem ‘Te Ihi’, with its breathy rhythm and repetition, begs to be heard: ‘ka ea, ka ea / it is clear, it is clear / whakapiri tonu whakapiri tonu / hold fast, hold fast.’
            The most engaging poems arrive like ‘kete’, a six-part poem that layers images of the stars into a mosaic of perspectives: ‘gypsophila / flowers / in a dark / bowl’, glitter against ‘stars / a myriad / of children / sparkling / in the night’. The poem ‘Uncle Hakaraia’ also offers a complex view of Uncle Hakaraia who was only allowed to speak English in school. ‘He was stood in the corner and made to feel / like a dumbcluck and a fool.’ The poem acknowledges the event’s emotional and cultural impact: ‘he speaks impeccable English … when he speaks of school days / his language is bitter.’
            One drawback of the collection is the lack of sections. It is unclear which work is new, and which has appeared in previous collections. It is also unclear if the poems are ordered chronologically, and this may disadvantage readers who are new to Taylor’s poetry. There are some loose thematic groupings. Poems about weaving and carving appear together, and are followed by poems about the loss of language and tradition. The centre of the book groups poems of settlement and colonisation, and the end of the collection features animal and family poems. The dedication to the collection reads: ‘these verses are paddles / to the waka / a canoe of poems / in midstream’, and while the book offers a progression of sorts, I am not sure how it reads as a collection.
            Another drawback is the length of the collection. The book would be stronger edited down to around one hundred pages. Some poems are noticeably weaker, especially those with summarising titles or punchline endings. While the brevity of some poems is reminiscent of haiku, many of the shorter poems hold no mystery and tend toward generalisation. While there is a certain power and impact in simplicity, the weaker poems make the collection feel like a work in progress. In short: most issues could be solved with a ruthless editorial eye. One poem promises, ‘words are / paltry things / so I turn them / into darts / and give them wings’, but a poem will only soar if it has the space to do so.

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SARAH JANE BARNETT is a poet and reviewer who lives in Wellington. Her reviews have appeared in The Lumière Reader, FishHead Magazine, and Victorious Magazine. Sarah is currently completing a creative writing PhD in the field of ecopoetics.

Classic Review: The Origins of the Maori Wars

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Gerald Hensley
This month’s classic review is from Landfall 47, September 1958.


The Origins of the Maori Wars, by Keith Sinclair (New Zealand University Press, 1957), 26s. 6d.


‘THE WAR’, said Wetini Taiporutu, ‘is not merely a contention for the land at New Plymouth, but for the chieftainship of New Zealand.’ With this declaration the old chief began a controversy that has continued until today.

           The cause of the struggle which began in Taranaki in 1860 and which went on for ten years to rack the North Island, cripple the government and nearly split the colony, could never again be so simply defined. The argument broke out as soon as the war itself, and at times raged a good deal more fiercely. It was praised as a war of civilization and condemned as a war of greed. Some thought it a protest against injustice and others a wilful rebellion; the government was alternately attacked for having started it and denounced for not getting on with it. The extremists on both sides hoped it would be a war of extermination. It was all very confusing, and unfortunately the confusion was in no way checked by the end of hostilities. Ever since, the causes and origins of the Maori wars – the greatest disaster in the country’s short lifetime – have been pored over with a morbid fascination; in pamphlet and in newspaper, in a bulky collection of polemic literature which began in 1861 and ended (if indeed it has ended) as recently as 1947. They have been subjected to searching scrutinies by Select Committees, Royal Commissions, judges and journalists, even by an ex-Minister of France. About the only thing this important historical problem had not received, indeed, is investigation by a good historian.

          Fortunately this omission has now been rectified. Dr Sinclair, in what may very possibly be the best monograph yet written on New Zealand history, grapples firmly with the massive controversy. He emerges with an answer which is at once more complicated and considerably less comforting than Wetini’s. The wars may have become indirectly a fight for sovereignty between King (Maori) and Queen (Victoria), but they began unromantically enough in a clash over land – the invariable point of friction between colonizing Europeans and aboriginal inhabitants. Land and sovereignty, Dr Sinclair argues, were inextricably connected. A situation where the settlers had the sovereignty and the Maoris had the land was bound to be dangerous: the former would be constantly tempted to use their political and military power to despoil the latter.
          To do the British Government justice, it recognized the difficulty. Anxious to protect the Maoris from a fate which seemed to be overtaking the natives in all other European settlements, it hoped to solve the problem by confiding the sovereignty, not to untrustworthy colonists, but to a Governor who could stand above and between, reconciling the interests of both races. For twenty years after the signing of the treaty of Waitangi the Governor, and theoretically the Governor alone, controlled native policy. The result was not encouraging. When it rose above mere temporizing – for inevitably Governors tended to be satisfied simply with preventing any fighting – the native policy of these years was confined to good intentions. Promising plans for a gradual integration of the races were almost nullified by imperfect execution the result of lack of money, lack of understanding, lack of staff, and lack of interest.
          Dr Sinclair, however, avoids the pitfall of supposing that this mattered much. The succession of schemes and policies, Native Councils and Native Courts, had surprisingly little bearing on whether a clash could be avoided or not. The political origins of the war can be overstressed; the main causes lay beyond the reach of government. The numerical inferiority of the settlers, and the disorganisation of the Maoris in the face of a European influx, contributed more to the uneasy peace of the early years than all the policy-making of successive Governors. The colony was not necessarily wise because its head was Grey. As growing settlement threw them into increasing contact, as the pressure for land swelled, and as settlers and Maoris found themselves in economic rivalry farming for the goldfields market in Australia, the first signs of resentment and discontent began to appear on both sides. Then the rather self-conscious humanitarianism of British Governors could prevail little. Perhaps Dr Sinclair is stretching his evidence somewhat when he quotes the crudest anti-native propaganda which appeared in the most violent newspapers, and then describes it as ‘the views of the majority of Europeans’. It may be so, but it is impossible to prove. Nor is it safe to discount the views of ‘thinking men’ who, he tells us, read such papers with disgust, for it was precisely these thinking men who had most influence in the government. But there can be no questioning Dr Sinclair’s main point that innumerable frictions, squabbles, and misunderstandings of each other’s ways built up in the minds of either race a stock concept of the other-the shiftless savage and the, greedy settler, the sort of stereotypes over which people will fight. ‘The war began in the minds of many men of both races long before it occurred in the fields and bush.’
          Was war therefore inevitable? Dr Sinclair seems to think so, and he is in good company. Sir Frederic Rogers of the Colonial Office (Dr Sinclair follows the illustrious but rather lonely example of Earl Granville in persistently calling him Sir Frederick) turned his thoughts again in later life to New Zealand. In the light of experience he concluded sadly that native races in temperate climates were always doomed to extinction by Anglo-Saxon settlers, and drew some comfort from the thought that the Maoris had had History as well as a considerable array of generals against them. But a claim of inevitability, though consoling, is too easy. Whatever might have happened in the long run, there was nothing inevitable about the clash which occurred in 1860. War broke out in that year for an exceedingly simple reason: because the Governor who was supposed to mediate and intercede between the races, instead allied himself and the Imperial troops he commanded with the land-desperate settlers of Taranaki. For the first time it made a war for land physically possible.
          The conduct of those who were responsible for this disastrous situation is carefully examined by Dr Sinclair in some of his best passages. He seems chiefly to censure the Governor, Sir Thomas Gore Browne (whose character is revealed with unhappy clarity in an accompanying photograph), for assuming control of native affairs in 1855 when he was in fact quite incompetent to do so. Gore Browne’s reservation of native policy may have been unfortunate, however, but it was not his fault. The Imperial Government made it abundantly clear at this time that while it bore the burden of defending the colony it could never yield control of native policy – so closely affecting defence – to colonial ministers. The error in the Imperial reasoning lay in assuming too readily that this control would be safer with the Governor. Dr Sinclair is more charitable about Gore Browne’s consent to the Waitara purchase (the immediate cause of war in Taranaki), holding justifiably that the Governor’s main fault was misunderstanding, a very humanitarian combination of good intentions and ignorance. Donald McLean is less easily exonerated from moral blame. Perhaps Dr Sinclair underestimates the good faith of the land purchase negotiations; there is a certain amount of evidence to suggest that so disorganised had the Atiawa tribe become that the existence of a chiefly authority to forbid land sales was seriously in doubt, and had in fact never been recognized by either Fitzroy or Grey. Nevertheless, this still leaves McLean in a rather ambiguous position, manoeuvring obscurely between a trustful Governor and an equally trustful Ministry.
          In the course of his account Dr Sinclair manages to lay some vigorous old ghosts. They have almost all been laid before at one time or another, but this time they will very probably remain so. The Land League, that mythical Maori trade union, disappears (it is to be hoped forever) from New Zealand historiography. And he makes it painfully clear that the ‘purchase’ of the Waitara block from the Maoris can no longer be regarded, even hopefully, as just. He is right; it is time this was said, and in such firm and incontrovertible tones. Only his final chapters on the extension of the war to the Waikato seem inconclusive and somewhat anti-climactic; they either repeat what has already been said, or raise entirely new questions which have to be left unanswered; they might have been better omitted.
          Yet every chapter shows its author’s distinctive virtues: the alertly-argued style, the balanced judgment, the clarity of exposition, the flashes of a slightly sardonic wit. Indeed the only traces of the book’s doctoral origins are to be found in the accuracy of its documentation. Dr Sinclair has now strayed off to more enticing pastures later in the century, but it is impossible not to regret that he has not given in a second volume a discussion of the wars as good as his analysis of their origins. With this book the writing of New Zealand history emerges a little further from its anecdotage: for the first time a large and difficult problem is dissected by one who mixes industry and insight in proportions as rare today among historians as they are among anyone else. It is all the more pity, therefore, that the printing and binding should be unworthy of so important a book.

Showing Us Around Oceania

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Vilsoni Hereniko
Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English, edited by Albert Wendt, Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan (Auckland University Press, 2010) 304 pp., $49.99

In Wendt’s 1976 essay ‘Towards a New Oceania’, he wrote the following about Oceania, of which Polynesia is a part: ‘So vast, so fabulously varied a scatter of islands, nations, cultures, mythologies and myths, so dazzling a creature, Oceania deserves more than an attempt at mundane fact; only the imagination in free flight can hope – if not to contain her – to grasp some of her shape, plumage, and pain.’[i] It is hard to believe that this influential essay was written thirty-five years ago because it is just as relevant today as it was then, when a cultural renaissance was beginning to spread throughout Oceania. Wendt was one of the major catalysts for the arts during this time, and his influence in fostering and encouraging poets to create and publish was just as intense then as it is today.
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Painted Words

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David Eggleton 
Towards a Promised Land: On the life and art of Colin McCahon, by Gordon H. Brown (Auckland University Press, 2010) hardback, colour plates and illustrations, 216 pp., $79.99


Evangelism takes strange forms. Arthur Stace, a former alcoholic who became a Christian, spent thirty-seven years chalking the word ‘Eternity’ in beautiful copperplate onto the pavements of Sydney before his death in 1967. Toss Woollaston’s uncle, Frank, was another eccentric evangelist. One of the illustrations in Gordon H. Brown’s

Towards a Promised Land: On the Life and Art of Colin McCahon is of Colin McCahon’s ‘A Painting for Uncle Frank’, a late work (1980) containing (written in white paint over a black background) a quotation from the New English Bible’s Book of Ecclesiastes, which includes the words ‘Those who refuse to hear the oracle speaking on earth find no escape.’ McCahon met Uncle Frank a number of times during the late 1930s and early 1940s at Toss Woollaston’s house in Motueka, and was fascinated by Uncle Frank’s ‘teaching aids’: his naïve paintings of simple Christian symbols, part of his itinerant preaching paraphernalia which he insisted on pinning to the walls of Toss Woollaston’s home whenever he was visiting, much to his nephew’s irritation.

            Uncle Frank’s visual texts, as Brown outlines, were just one influence on McCahon’s complex build-up to the 1954 creation of his first distinctive all-word paintings. There was also the example of speech balloons in cartoons, comics and advertising (most famously the lettering encased in a bubble shape on the Rinso soap flakes packet). And Brown quotes McCahon’s childhood visual epiphany of a commercial signwriter at work on the words HAIRDRESSER & TOBACCONIST on a shop window: ‘Painted gold and black on a stippled red ground, the lettering large and bold with shadows … I watched the work being done, and fell in love with signwriting.’
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Haunted

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Jenny Powell
Weathered Bones, by Michele Powles (Penguin Books, 2009), 299 pp., $25.99

This is one of the few books I have had dreams about. The sea in it ended up permeating my nights: images of a blue-black seething ocean — repetitious, insistent images that are as compelling to the reader as they are to its characters — dominate Michele Powles’ first novel.
            Weathered Bones weaves together the lives of three women, initially unacquainted but about to become closer than they ever could have imagined. Eliza McGregor arrives in Wellington in 1840. Despite her initial new-immigrant expectations, life soon plummets from joy to the depression of a lonely grind at Pencarrow lighthouse. Her husband drinks his earnings, and her young children exhaust her spirit. The husband’s eventual drowning leads to Eliza herself becoming the keeper of the light.

            This is a fascinating aspect of the book, historically speaking, as ‘Eliza’ was inspired by the true-life story of Mary Jane Bennett, appointed New Zealand’s first keeper of a permanent lighthouse at Pencarrow in 1858. Powles allows us the opportunity to ponder the difficult life of Mary Jane, who was surely one of New Zealand’s early feminists.
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