Mary Macpherson
Hoof by Kerrin P. Sharpe (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024), 96pp, $25; PLASTIC by Stacey Teague (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024), 112pp, $30; About Now by Richard Reeves (Maungatua Press, 2024), 110pp, $25
When writing a review of three poetry books, you’d hope to find some connecting threads between them, which would lead to some clever remarks to introduce all three. But in this case, the most unifying thing to say about these books is that they represent the diversity of poetic voices and sensibilities in Aotearoa New Zealand and that, in itself, is engaging enough.
After my first reading of Kerrin P. Sharpe’s Hoof I wrote, ‘magic, emotional/hefty themes and musicality’: words that summed up my immediate impressions of her collection. Subsequent readings of the poems strengthened these reactions. Spending time with Sharpe’s work is rather like being in a Chagall painting with fairytale people and surreal objects floating around suggestive backgrounds. But these qualities don’t denote charming whimsy, although that is present in Sharpe’s work, but rather the mythic part of folktales that taps into the logic of our subconscious.
‘Hoof’, the opening poem, joins together a train and a horse:
The train with the chest
of a horse and the traction
of old intelligence
turns from power stations
and cooling towers
and heads for the trees.
Is this a symbol of a person or a being in its own right? Reading on, and taking into account other poems about Sharpe’s father, I suspected she was alluding to human breakdown:
Through his mane of rain
and nostril smoke
float poems of blocked arteries,
quadruple bypasses.
The train-horse moves into the world of a new forest with fresh discoveries but ends up in a gloomy siding room ‘where he writes all night/in search of light’. The allusiveness of the narrative creates an unsettling impression of an old person, adrift and out of step.
The first section of Hoof includes a number of poems that play with qualities of horses, people, shadows and trees to create psychological or emotional landscapes. In the poem ‘Still’, trees are being removed from a forest—‘Trees are leaving— / claws clamped, / growls muzzled’—images that suggest brutality. The last stanza however, as in other poems, offers spiritual consolation:
The trees are leaving
with fur in their hearts
and honey in their blood,
the divinity of the forest
still inside them.
The final poems of the section deal with the passing of the poet’s parents. The penultimate poem, ‘in loco parentis’, gives us the image of wind turbines watching over her parents’ grave chanting—‘like monks in a friary’—relieving the speaker of worry about leaving them in a cemetery. Even manufactured objects are imbued with emotion and magical properties in Sharpe’s poetic world.
In the following two sections the most significant poems highlight the consequence of climate change in contests between the sea and human activity, and then take us to Polar Regions. The music of Sharpe’s short lines that step quickly through surreal ideas, carry these weighty themes well. The poem ‘the sea takes a wife’ is set out in two columns. One outlines a man building a seaside bach, his wedding and his wife giving birth, a water-filled activity. But in the other, the sea is busy undermining these emblems of human security. Despite the man’s efforts to defend his world:
the sea with lips and arms
warming the rising water
carries the surf break
like a bride
The third section takes us to the Arctic and Greenland, where the ice, animals, human beings and ways of life are threatened by a warming world. The book ends in a series of poems where Sharpe voices the thoughts of early Antarctic explorers, circling us back to when humans broke into pristine environments. The voyage with Kerrin P. Sharpe is always taken through a prism of dancing images and quick ideas that carry both occasional poems and weighty themes.
One of the pleasures of Stacey Teague’s book PLASTIC is the skill with which she uses contrasting forms and voices across her collection as she takes us on her journey to find her way back to te ao Māori. The book opens with HOKI, a group of descriptive prose poems that have the emotional power of family snapshots. Here Teague returns to her family home in Auckland and eases her way back into family relationships with her Dad, Mum, older sister, niece, cat and wider whānau. But underlying it all is an anxiety about her Māori identity. The poems’ direct and delicate observations allow Teague to pose these questions effortlessly. In ‘KŌRERO’ she questions her Mum:
Mum twirls a lock of her thick auburn hair repeatedly
around her index finger. Her nails are long and painted red.
She thinks about the question. Nobody in this family wants
to dwell on the past.
Of course I identify as Māori, she says.
Teague then explains her unease about trying to find her way into te ao Māori when she hasn’t grown up in it. In PLASTIC an aunt refers to her Mum as ‘Ngāti Plastic’ and giggles. It’s a reference to ‘Māori who do not know te reo, / tikanga or their whakapapa’. The poem ‘BONES’ introduces the idea from poet Anahera Gildea that ‘Bones are whakapapa’. Asked by an uncle, ‘Are you finally getting to know your bones?’ Teague tells us:
I am ashamed, yes, but resolute. How have I moved through
The world for so long without knowing my own bones?
It’s easy, when the messages you receive are that it is not a
good thing to be Māori. You hide away, you pretend to be
something else. It was easy to cosplay as Pākeha …
And so we understand something of the depth of her pain.
In the next section, ‘PLASTIC’, Teague explores her interior world of dreams and feelings in lyric poems about life in a colonised landscape. Often writing after the styles of other writers, such as Talia Marshall, Jack Underwood, Kaveh Akbar, Amy Kay and essa may ranapiri, she keeps the modes of expression changing and the reader engaged. The following short section, ‘SPELLS I’, takes us deeply into the personal where Teague uses titles of poems to call for repairs and healing, pointing to the self-care needed to survive on this journey. The titles include: spell to divert love from one object to another, spell for self-compassion, spell to be a little tender. The poems act as answers to the call of the titles:
spell to repair broken things
absent mindedly finger the hole
in the gusset of your stockings
the same way you notice yourself
tenderly cupping your own breast
In the remainder of the book, Teague takes us deeper into te ao Māori, the world of female Māori gods, then her own Tūpuna Wāhine in a series of poignant reimaginings of her female ancestors, ending with a vivid portrait of her Narn on the occasion of her funeral. For the penultimate section, she returns to the emotional accuracy of the prose poems that began the quest for her Māori identity. In ‘Tokikapu’ she uses her skill with descriptions of people and landscape to evoke the texture of the everyday and the importance of visiting her home marae. More ‘SPELLS’, such as spell to see the future and spell to gain courage, follow. This is a resonant conclusion to a carefully choreographed journey both through and in poetry.
The first poem in Richard Reeve’s collection About Now, is ‘Recycled Rimu’. It sets the scene for a broad-ranging book concerned with where we are now as a civilisation and the people, events and land in the life of a forthright, rational and self-deprecating narrator. Like several of Reeve’s poems, it’s set in the everyday domestic but takes off into a bigger universe. In this case the poet’s recycled rimu ceiling carries us back through the colonial history of wood:
the rage and serenity of the grain hinting at a story
of the first wood, centuries of bird song and weather,
branches rubbing up against each other in a gale,
the company of fungi, the ocean beyond
roaring in lines that emanate from the heartwood.
Reeves uses the journey of rimu through time to paint a social portrait of Dunedin—‘uptight households’ and ‘those stately hill-suburb homes/turned student flats’—before implicating his own involvement in taking up the offer of ‘old forest’ at ‘1$ per lineal metre, give-or-take’.
The robust voice of this collection is evident in the title poem ‘About now’, which features the narrator arguing with ‘a youngster (he was younger than me)’ about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Trump, after an afternoon’s boating. Like many of Reeves’ poems it ranges from evocative details of the quotidian such as:
meowls of the aging Burmese cat hankering to be fed,
the fragrance of a recently manicured hedge, of the lawn,
the sea breathing through its face mask in the distance
to the lofty where the repeated defence of positions becomes:
exhausting sentences that must be repeated again and again,
sewn into poems, as antidotes to fascism or capitalism
as Reeves questions what to say ‘to the civilisation in denial?’ With typical humour however he returns us to wine spilled on his shorts and his walking home with, ‘the light of the world’ becoming a streetlight memory of the afternoon, ‘the blurred apotheosis’.
Like the other collections of this review, About Now is divided into themed sections but they’re less part of a linear journey than gathering places for clutches of related poems in a generously diverse book. The unity of the collection comes from the tone of the narrator and threads of social comment, addressed to departed people, whether older poets, colleagues or friends, intertwined with the visceral presence of land and weather.
In keeping with the forthright voice of the book, the publishing page announces that it was ‘Published without the assistance of Creative New Zealand’. Despite this, across the three collections, About Now takes the bouquet for book design and production. Its brown paper cover and endpapers with matching bookmark, Manu Berry illustrations and Munken paper nod in a satisfying way to the aesthetic of a handmade book and reinforce the robust, ruminative ethos of the collection.
MARY MACPHERSON is a poet, photographer, art writer and photobook publisher from Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Her poems have appeared in many print and online journals. Her first poetry collection is Social Media (The Cuba Press, 2019).
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