Airini Beautrais
Everyone is Everyone Except You by Jordan Hamel (Dead Bird Books, 2022), 69pp, $30; A Question Bigger than a Hawk by Jan FitzGerald (The Cuba Press, 2022), 72pp, $25; People Person by Joanna Cho (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), 95pp, $30
Jordan Hamel is a performance poet as well as a poet for the page, having won the New Zealand Poetry Slam in 2018 and represented New Zealand at the World Poetry Slam Champs in 2019. His debut poetry collection, Everyone is Everyone Except You, has strongly performative qualities. These poems interrogate their subject matter in ways that would be equally at home on page or stage: from the visceral horror of ‘Meat mannequin’ to the creepy kink of ‘Sex toy roadshow’, exploring 90s nostalgia, Christianity and Kiwi bloke culture along the way. The shock value in these poems doesn’t feel gratuitous, more part of a performance of introspection. How deep do we go before we come right out the other side, into something else? Perverseness seems an important part of the process.
Hamel describes himself in the acknowledgments section as an ‘irony-poisoned millennial’. This statement, and the tone of many of the poems in this collection, also leads me to ponder the question: what is the place of irony in contemporary New Zealand poetry? It no longer has the compulsory status it seemed to have a generation ago when emerging writers were actively discouraged from being ‘too earnest’. But it’s still a mode frequently employed, perhaps because writing poetry in a contemporary world is often an ironic act in itself. In an essay on Ian Wedde in his 2002 collection, Kin of Place, C.K. Stead describes Murray Edmond telling him, in the 1970s, that ‘he and Wedde and the Freed poets were doing away with irony. They were going to be the first New Zealand poets who had “the courage of their emotions.”’ Stead, on the other hand, has a critical genealogy dating back to the New Critics, ‘who tended to use irony and ambiguity as a measure of excellence’. Rather than a millennial poison, poetic irony is more of an ongoing conversation with tradition, something that is also inescapable as a contemporary poet. This conversing is something Hamel shares with Hera Lindsay Bird, whose influence is very much present in this collection.
But Hamel’s poetry also speaks into a conversation about masculinity, which, in New Zealand especially, is a particularly uncomfortable thing. We come across the emotionally distant father, the crying rugby player, the male mermaid:
Not all mermaids are royalty
someone needs to audit the ocean
provide cash flow projections
some mermaids are actually
middle-aged accountants named Stephen
dreaming of a land-view holiday home.
Through these depictions of male characters, the relationships between irony and emotional sincerity are explored, as in ‘Death coach’, a poem that feels like the emotional core of the collection:
I once cried to a handsome young priest that living felt too constant
something I could barely hold, and would it be better if I just let go?
He didn’t give me any answers, but he added me on Facebook.
So that’s why I’m here now, who needs Facebook priests
when you have me, good shepherd of pointlessness
Hamel’s wider work as a performance poet and as one of the editors of a recent anthology of climate change poetry provides perspective on the stylistic tensions in his work. Rather than a ‘good shepherd of pointlessness’. Hamel describes himself in his editorial bio as using poetry and performance ‘to create awareness and discourse about environmental and political issues’. Thus, Everyone is Everyone Except You could be seen as a meditation on neoliberalism and its effects.
A Question Bigger than a Hawk is Jan FitzGerald’s fourth poetry collection. There is a focus on telling stories that have been buried: a fifteen-year-old mother, a failed abortion, adoption and its emotional consequences. There are also more light-hearted stories, such as childhood memories of stealing feijoas, studying nature, or trying to catch birds to keep as pets. And there are encounters with interesting characters: the agnostic window washer, the priest who plays ‘Lady of Spain’ on the electric organ. Many of the poems are highly evocative of a time and place: in the opening poem, ‘Ladies restroom, 1950s’, Fitzgerald depicts women performing wardrobe adjustments and socialising in a public bathroom:
Petticoats were hitched up to the waist,
dresses smoothed down over hips.
‘Ahhh!’ The letting out of girdles.
‘Ouch!’ The nip of clip-on earrings.
One woman wore a hat of leaves and berries,
bright as a garden;
another, a dead fox slung around her neck.
I enjoyed reading these narratives, both the difficult and the irreverent, in part because the times and places depicted are gone, along with many of the characters we meet in these poems. Social attitudes and behaviours have changed, and poetry can provide a kind of record, communicating history in ways beyond the normal scope of traditional prose histories.
Fitzgerald has explored the use of inherited forms, particularly the villanelle. American poet Maxine Kumin describes a ‘paradoxical freedom’ in working with form: as she experiences it, ‘constraints of rhyme and/or meter liberate the poet to confront difficult or painful or elegiac material’. This certainly appears to be the case here. The language in ‘Natural mother’ is simple, direct and forceful:
Our alikeness was so insane,
even the same eyebrow that wouldn’t behave.
Dug up only to be buried again.
You said you never got over the pain
(I was the sin they never forgave).
Our alikeness was so insane.
Here, the sing-song rhyme and meter of the villanelle, a traditional song form, contrasts with this semantic bluntness to produce emotional heft. Throughout the collection, there is a sense of an experienced writer with a mature voice, being able to confront difficult material in a variety of ways, which will no doubt be relatable for a wide range of readers.
Joanna Cho’s debut collection, People Person, is a mix of poems and longer prose pieces that might be described as essay poems or hybrid forms. These poems and hybrids deal with family stories, largely focusing on the experience of a migrant family moving back and forth between New Zealand and South Korea. It’s often an uncomfortable read: the reality of racial prejudice in New Zealand is not glossed over.
In ‘The gift’, which considers the significance of names, Cho writes: ‘Once, a bouncer looked at my ID, laughed and said Ching Chong China …’
In one of the longer pieces, ‘The white swans are dancing with their eyes closed, in the flurry’ (a title that is a poem in itself), she describes her mother’s experiences as a home care provider:
Some of her clients refuse to talk to her, turning up their nose, yelling commands from across the room, and I wonder if they know who she is—the mythical swan maiden, the princess of the Moon family, the prodigy of the fine arts department. “Show them your powers!” I want to yell.
The difficulties and the joys in family relationships are also explored. In ‘The white swans’, Cho writes:
These are the narratives we tell over and over again; they keep us connected through all the distance we have created and maintained. Our relationships shrink and expand and shrink again like a jellyfish opening and closing its bell. Blood tethers, clots.
Our true reactions and preferences are inconsistent, but we smooth these out by reframing our experiences in a consistent narrative.
The collection also contains stories about being young and finding voice and purpose. Some of the issues are specific to the author; some are more widely relatable for members of her generation. In ‘Our Skin Rubs Off’, Cho describes being ‘the friend who wants a baby’. The difficulty in making this choice in a contemporary world is highlighted: ‘If I have a baby and the world is even more cooked, will I be able to say twenty years is better than none?’ Here, poetry provides a vehicle for asking difficult questions and for contrasting big subjects with smaller, more humorous ones: the same poem opens with an anecdote about a man whose skin keeps rubbing off because ‘he’s an eraser!’
Cho has made the choice not to translate all the Korean terms and names, which are mostly written in Korean script. A reader unfamiliar with Korean language is given pause when coming across a term they can’t sound out. I found this moment for reflection refreshing. As a reader of poetry in Aotearoa, I feel there is often pressure for writers to translate all the words in languages other than English, often in a lengthy notes section. This is ideally the writer’s decision, but it is good to think of it as optional. This book will be experienced differently by readers of varying language backgrounds, but this is always the case. I appreciated the sense that this collection was written wholly in accordance with its author’s intentions, reflecting the unique facets of her life and the different communities she is a part of.
These three collections, with their widely varying voices, have something in common: they all explore stories that feel timely and important to tell. Although they are different in tone and possibly appealing to different audiences, each collection is a welcome addition to the local poetry ecosystem.
AIRINI BEAUTRAIS is a Whanganui-based writer and teacher. Her most recent work is Bug Week (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2020)
References:
Stead, C.K., Kin of Place: Essays on New Zealand writers (Auckland University Press, 2002)
Kumin, Maxine, ‘Paradoxical Freedom’ in Finch, Annie (ed.) A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in form by contemporary women (Brownsville, OR: Story Line Press, 1994)
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