Lynley EdmeadesUnder Dundas Street Bridge, by Peter Olds (Steele Roberts 2012), 70 pp., $19.95; Journey to the Far South, by Peter Olds, with woodcuts by Wayne Seyb (Cold Hub, 2012), 28 pp., $19.50; Flaubert’s Drum, by Sugu Pillay (Interactive Press) 105 pp., $28; Ticket Home, by Jenny Powell (Cold Hub, 2012) 36 pp. 40 pp., $19.50.
Of these four collections under review, two share the umbrella of the chapbook concept —Jenny Powell’s Ticket Home, and Peter Old’s Journey to the Far South. Moreover, they share locations (they are strongly rooted in Dunedin and surrounds) — which is not all these short collections have in common: they also both come from Lyttelton’s Cold Hub Press, and they both take journeys through the each poet’s personal and intimate histories.
While both of these collections show moments of poetic integrity, there is something missing in both these chapbooks that is not necessarily the fault of the poets — rather, the responsibility falls on the shoulders of the publisher. Cold Hub Press specializes in the design, printing and publishing of contemporary New Zealand poetry. It does a great job — both these chapbooks are of high print and design caliber — but what it isn’t particularly adept at is the editorial process.
Perhaps I’m wrong in saying this, but I feel that for a small book of poems to be successful, the chapbook needs to justify its existence by doing what it does in a highly concentrated space. As the short story is to the novel, the chapbook is the full collection — it has to work hard. It has to be outstanding. Conversely, these two collections feel, at times, like side projects; a gathering up of the pieces that haven’t yet found their way into another elsewhere. There seems to be some impatience in the publication of collections like these. While some of these poems show great potential and energy, for the small collection to work they need to surrounded by other, equally great, poems.
Jenny Powell knows how to write a great poem; she knows lyricism and she writes with a cinematic theme and presence. And she knows the risk of taking herself — and the world — too seriously. From ‘Eco Tour Group in Car Park’:
Instructions for seal on rock
by car park:
Face crowd of dark glasses
and flashing lights.
Wave flipper until they do
the same.
Raise upper body, side profile.
Wait for lights to stop.
Roll from side to side, follow
with large pause.
She does wry observation well, and this understated wit suits her style — it’s a shame there’s not more of it. What she does do more often though, is show a careful treatment of the meditative lyric. Poems like ‘Charles Henry F. Powell reveal her reflexive and sympathetic imagination:
Charlie stroking
the bird, death lurking in the air, his mind
drowsy, his body mined.
When she pays attention to the music of the words and the rhythm of the line, Powell constructs a potent poetic space. But these are peppered amongst large amounts of lackadaisical turns of phrase, inconsistent line breaks and a tendency towards the sentimental. But perhaps that’s a strategy to highlight the heightened moments?
*
Last year was a productive one for Peter Olds. It saw the publication of both his chapbook, Journey to the Far South, and his full-length collection of a similar flavour, Under the Dundas Street Bridge. Coming from different publishers, however, these collections offer up slight variations on a theme. Olds is concerned with the metaphysical bounds of travelling, meditations on place, and the ways to deal with the self in these particular locations (physical or metaphysical). Dunedin (and ex-Dunedin) readers will recognize street names, since-closed cafes, musical eras that have come and gone. Others will hear the anguish of the poet, as he reaches into his own living memories of periods of mental instability (How to Avoid Depression, and How to Beat Anxiety are but two particular poems exemplifying this).
For someone who has had a long history of writing and engaging with the extended poetic network of the region, Olds has an idiosyncratic grasp of the craft. His language is sometimes syntactically loose and his repetitive use of parentheses would be more at home in prose, perhaps. While this often works, it very rarely gives over the feeling that the reader can completely relax into it. Which is perhaps the effect that Olds is aiming for — discomfort, questioning of traditional structures, the avoidance of orthodox forms. On the contrary, there are some truly lovely, almost Larkin-esque moments, where the poet does find his place within regular frameworks:
We dawdle through Green Island
where the shops look like bomb shelters. We loop around
Abbotsford and pick up no one. The man with the pack of groceries
gets off at the convent. After Waldronville, black swans.
(from ‘There’s still snow on Flagstaff’)
This is Olds at his finest, hinting at the madness and folly of the iconoclastic, working-class hero. He lets us in on not only to his anarchistic reactions to bourgeois shit, but also into the tedious and everyday workings of the mind: After I finished with the psychiatrist I went back over the Leith/to the corner store where I bought a potato-top pie & a carton of/flavoured milk (‘Lemon Tree’).
In Journey to the Far South however, there is a subtlety the chapbook format lends him that the full collection does not. Both his poems and his collections benefit from being contained, in some way. This smaller collection, or chapbook, gives the reader just enough of what Olds is trying to do, without overstating itself. While the themes of Journey to the Far South invoke freedom and liberation, the better poems in here are those that don’t shirk tradition or regulated poetic structure. ‘Nocturnal Salad’ is constructed of neatly clipped quatrains:
It’s 10pm and the TV still operates
in the main lounge, jangling those
patients who have not yet found
their crooked way to bed.
So Olds invites us in, and succeeds in etching out a space where his voice can be heard. He flips the finger to traditional poetic craft, just as he does to the conservative — worthy but dull — New Zealand landscape tradition he’s writing from within. At his most potent, Olds has something to say and is saying it; in his weaker moments, he doesn’t seem sure that poetry will get him there.
*
Where these three collections meet — in their regular residence of New Zealand and the exploration of its vernacular — is where Sugu Pillay’s collection departs. Pillay was born in Malaysia of Indian descent, and came to New Zealand in 1973. Her recent collection, Flaubert’s Drum, explores themes of geographical relocation and cultural diaspora, the varied mythologies and memories that travel with the poet through time and space, and draws of a plethora of historical and textual references. Fittingly, the book opens with a quote from Gertrude Stein: Writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The reader’s led to wonder, where is it that writers ‘live really’? A question that Pillay circumnavigates throughout the collection:
seated between a Sri Lankan & a Vietnamese
one who speaks and one who doesn’t
I think of landfall & the contest for space
the diaspora & the severed tongues
I realize it’s indeed high drama
the moves blocked in Shakespeare’s Time
(from ‘Kowhai Gold’)
This ‘landfall & the contest for space’ is twofold: the migrant’s arrival in a foreign place, and the awareness of a national literary history. Indeed, this ‘one who speaks, and one who doesn’t speak’, while referring to two alien ‘others’ could also be an allegory for the psychic divide—that writer who resides in two different ‘countries’.
Beyond the textual qualities of these poems, Pillay shows a reverence for multicultural mythologies and historical references. She’s entering a conversation with some of the cultural greats, just as the collection’s title suggests. Beckett, Woolf, Burns, Derrida, Chomsky, Joyce, Calvino, Shakespeare, Keats, Picasso, Kahlo, de Kooning, Kovalan and Matavi (from the Tamil epic Cilapadikaram), Turanga and Parehuia (from the Maori legend of Taranaki) — they’re all in there. There are some lovely moments in these enduring and trans-historical conversations:
The concreted banks
hold back turgid waters
plied by dreaming minds
going too far back in time
like de Kooning’s door to the river
flowing past to present
in a burst of yellow
(from ‘Stirring Dull Roots’)
But the peppering of a collection with intertextual references alone doesn’t allow the collection to work in conversation with those that are being spoken to. Rather than addressingthe eponymous ‘other’, the majority of these poems are discussing this ‘other’. Which is to say, while we get a sense of the poet’s intellectual curiosity, the voice remains continually outside the work. This is not a surprise, given the cultural fragmentation that has seemingly led to their conception. There are several exceptions, where we exit commentary, and enter a place of exemplarity; of showing, not telling: always love shivers & puckers/out there beyond where white sails/dip in dip out picking up the good phrase (from ‘Tradition & the Poet I’).
*
In a lesson on poetic composition, Northern Irish poet Sinead Morrissey, uses an architectural analogy. She says that during the writing of a poem scaffolding is erected to enable the construction of the piece. She suggests, then, that during the editorial process, this scaffolding must be first identified and then subsequently removed, at which point the poem must be able to stand on its own. This is the ultimate test of the composition, she claims—the poem standing up for itself, without aid, without explanation.
Poetry can be, and sometimes is ‘an existential and linguistic epiphany’, as Vaughan Rapatahana recently commented. There are those rare occasions where you really find something, when something about that shared space stirs you and makes you think, yes; something happens. But they’re rare and portentous occasions, and they come with the piquant aroma of the poet’s perspiration lingering in the background. They reside in the spaces from which the scaffolding has been removed. Perhaps we’ve become accustomed with living in construction sites.
LYNLEY EDMEADES has recently returned to New Zealand from Northern Ireland, where she was studying poetry. She is currently a postgraduate at the University of Otago, writing a thesis on John Cage. Her poems have been published in various journals in New Zealand, UK, Ireland, and the US, and she is also a regular reviewer for the Listener.
Leave a Reply