Tony Beyer
Hotel Theresa by Doc Drumheller (Cold Hub Press, 2024), 96pp, $28; Slender Volumes by Richard von Sturmer (Spoor Books, 2024), 192pp, $38; Islands by Brett Cross (Vagabond Press, 2024), 80pp, $25
Self-identified as a dual citizen of the USA and Aotearoa New Zealand, Doc Drumheller is, moreover, a true internationalist, a stance confirmed by his writing, editing and activities as a representative for poetry. The seventy poems in Hotel Theresa reference a traveller’s diversity of locations. Encompassing everything from family, traditional and popular culture, art, music and politics through to events and personalities, they share the common theme of humane engagement. Nearly all are unrhymed sonnets in end-stopped couplets, arranged in ten seven-poem sections with collective titles.
The first section is ‘Psalms for a Broken City’, a subheading, like the later ‘Hymns Behind the Iron Curtain’, hinting at a ritualistic undertone or intention. The topic here, however, is the 2011 Christchurch earthquake and its aftermath. Refreshingly, we encounter both the devastation and the almost immediate spirit of renewal, including some whimsical suggestions for the future. ‘Living in the Dark’, the first poem, echoes Māori cosmology, while in ‘Detour Games’, set in the reviving city:
Central streets are Snakes and Ladders
wound around clogged arteries of traffic.
A deeper context emerges in ‘Lest We Forget’:
Storm water drains are desolate trenches
piles of sandbags surround the battlefield.
Lest we forget the white marbled soldier
surviving the war of endless aftershocks.
The following sections, ‘The Treasured Places’ and ‘My Republic’, interact with family and personal history, and with Māoritanga. There is warm, good humour in ‘Half-Price Proverbs’:
Beware of geeks bearing gifts
beauty is in the eye of the shareholder.
Epigrammatic sound bites like these are easy to cherry-pick from Drumheller’s pages but also misleading. In effect, the seven two-line sentences in each sonnet, piquant in themselves, gain their real strength by accumulation, building their associations into robust discourses, paratactic more than argumentatively sequenced. The impression is similar to that of linkage in Japanese aesthetics, with the occasional run-on in sense between sentences adding a kind of syncopation.
Among the most memorable examples of Drumheller’s skilful observation are the recollections of family origins in the section ‘The Swamp of My Childhood’. There is a sad, hard-earned affection in ‘Some Things My Daddy Used to Say’:
And never forget there are only two types
of music in the world: Country and Western.
The few less successful poems, mainly confined to the ‘Death of Irony’ section, feel as if they’ve been composed on the hoof, which offers, if not an excuse, an energetic explanation. Sometimes these impulses are hard to resist or change.
In later sections, Drumheller writes impressively about China, Japan, India and the Americas. His awareness of the storehouse of Asian poetry provides him with fertile ground. He also displays one of his most cherished loyalties in ‘Via Ferlinghetti’, a dream poem both wistful and unsentimental. Tellingly, ‘Search for a Cure’, regarding the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacres, is a poem in eight couplets, breaking with the set pattern preceding it, as if this subject can fit no preprogrammed or formulaic reaction. Considering that all the poems were written between 2011 and 2024, their content is still chillingly up to the minute, as evidenced by the opening lines of ‘No Vacancy’:
The body is a hotel for the soul
neon vacancy signs light up America.
In the case of Richard von Sturmer’s Slender Volumes, the project itself organises the text: three hundred seven-line prose poems in response to the three hundred kōans of thirteenth-century Zen Master Eihei Dōgen. The division into six fifty-poem sections seems to be for the reader’s convenience and not a thematic guide. It’s touching that the ‘slender volumes’ of the title appear as children’s books, not necessarily poetry, in prose poem 69 ‘Families Use it Daily’. If all this sounds a bit obscure or esoteric, the author’s preface and notes, and Erena Shingade’s lucid introduction, go a long way towards clearing the ground for an uninitiated reader, wary of philosophical or religious aspects of the book.
Well-experienced as a practitioner of haiku and tanka, von Sturmer uses in these paragraphs a technique closest to haibun, but without the conventional concluding haiku. His rich talent for compression and vivid description is ideally suited to the task he has set himself. Inspired by the kōans, which are often gently confrontational, these ‘small stories’ include personal anecdotes, literary references, current and historical events, revered teachers, and family memories. From a Zen point of view, all ‘ten thousand things’ are present. Sometimes personae are employed and at others the narrative and its participants are clearly autobiographical. Each of the three hundred poems is a contained work and a tangential or direct response to its originating episode.
Rough and ready at times, calm and accepting too, Zen comprises a heartily ancient take on earthly being. It seems unfair from a spoiler angle to quote any of the prose poems in full. Unusually, all are equally good. One or two intense moments will have to suffice. Small in stature, von Sturmer names two protectors who shielded him from bullies at primary school. The poem concludes:
One day a boy menaced me and they pinned his arms behind his
back and invited me to punch him. I declined and told them to
let him go. Right there in the playground, we were either mapping
out new directions for ourselves or recreating old patterns from
long ago.
(27 ‘Linji’s Enlightenment’)
Much further on:
On a street in Bologna a beggar raises the stump of his right arm
and challenges each person to drop some coins into his invisible
hand. I regret not taking up the challenge … Such things remain
with us as we walk through this life.
(174 ‘Buddha’s Begging Bowl’)
Soon afterwards comes a core belief of both Zen practice and of the poems themselves:
‘Things are not as they seem, nor are they otherwise.’
(178 ‘Linji Sees Huangbo Reading a Sūtra’)
This principle recurs with more urgent vocabulary:
And while a voice on the radio extols the wonders of virtual
reality, reality itself is blazing and burning and freezing us
to the bone.
(225 ‘Dongshan’s “Cold and Heat”’)
In each instance, the physical imperative emphasises available wisdom. Enlightenment begins right where you are.
Elsewhere, a hidden room in the Sydney Opera House is explosively replete with all the music ever played there; a thief trapped in a locked room imagines himself the size of a sugar cube, which he drops in his coffee in an entirely other location; a silly accident reminds its victim of how all things are connected; and an ancient king relieves the stresses of war and bloodshed by taking up carpentry. There’s some provocative mischief, too. Why else would a protagonist choose to play ‘Libre como el Viento’ by Dracula y sus Vampiresas on the jukebox in a rather grim-sounding New Mexico café? Of course, the machine doesn’t work. Sympathy for all living things occurs in the description of a retirement paddock for former working donkeys in Sardinia. In prose poem 44, we read, ‘It’s hard to be me, just as I’m sure it’s hard to be you’. A kōan in itself. Here is the bristly, unanswerable visage of our lives. Yet in 259 we hear that Baijiao said, ‘When there is a question, there is an answer’.
Quite aside from the pleasure of individual pieces, Slender Volumes reads delightfully and addictively cover-to-cover. The characteristics of grace and generosity in von Sturmer’s writing make his best moments, and there are many of them, impossible to ignore or forget. He expertly combines a profound knowledge of Zen predecessors with an impeccable literary instinct. This is, by the way, a very handsome product from publishing newcomers Spoor Books. It’s to be hoped that more will be on the way from them soon.
Brett Cross’s debut poetry collection, Islands, comes from the very active Vagabond Press in Australia. His poems can best be described as organic in structure and content. This means, basically, that they find the form they need through what they need to say. At first sight, there is considerable difference between these pages and the ordered, preselected stanzas or paragraphs used by Drumheller and von Sturmer. On closer acquaintance the generally short stanzas and lines, minimally punctuated, exhibit careful discipline and respect for form.
In three parts, the book focuses on landscape observed in detail and ruminated upon intellectually and emotionally. The ‘backyard’ sequence is literally so: the coastline with its tides and repetitions, known viscerally since childhood, then gradually inhabited with plants, birds, animals and fellow humans. There is a growing sense that the complications brought about by town life contaminate all this. Immediacy is Cross’s distinctive poetic gift:
tattered
up the little known
hill
twenty cow tracks
diverge
mudthick trails
…
she plucks
toi toi
taller
than her brother
chases him
When this section coalesces into more grouped poems, there is a suppressed, almost ghostly, narrative of youthful restlessness:
the death of him
to return
The controlled pace and spacing of the lines is a powerful device, permitting ambiguity and nuance below a deceptively open surface.
Section II, ‘five seasons’, the central part of the book, develops more complex, time-oriented relationships with the land. In five sections, the sequence balances minerals, moods and locations to meditate on the layers of past and present use of the land for hunting and gathering, farming and eventual recreation, identifying human types related to these occupations. There is again some impatience and frustration mentioned among the celebrations of time and place. More successfully, though, there is elation in the concluding poems of the section and some beautiful imagery and verbal inventiveness:
a long canoe centipedes
along the coast of the peninsula
oars dipping in unison
We wade ashore in company with:
the cleansed swimmers
skin-tinglingly
fresh, and awake
to the joy, paddling
and young, and not
a moment to spare
for planning
Section III, ‘islands’, relocates the self as centred in the landscape. Another kind of island, having exact personal memories and preferences: ‘one’s / particular … / virgin / territory / to oneself’. Islands and their meanings, canoes and bush, a palimpsest of the land and its inhabitants. The final transition from the trite ‘seabirds’ to ‘the sea-coloured birds’ is masterly.
Interestingly, from the perspective of Modernist antecedents, Cross’s poems often aim at something like George Oppen’s Objectivism, but land closer to the Imagism and subsequent evolution of HD. This is not a bad thing. At some points the struggle for clarity, or even its opposite, might have been eased by a re-ordering of lines:
the gravestones white teeth
ancient script: water symbol
the inward-facing city
blindfolded moths
drawn towards
There are also parallels, in form and treatment of landscape and environmental content, with the minimalism of contemporary Scottish poet Thomas A. Clark. These could be territories worth further exploration. As it is, the felt atmosphere of Cross’s work is individual and unmistakable.
All three poets under review are to be commended for their focus on poetry as an art form, not just an infrequently reliable vehicle for polemic. This doesn’t prevent them from investigating firmly held concerns and expressing these in effective language, the latter half of the equation being where the poetry occurs.
TONY BEYER writes in Taranaki. Recent work has appeared in Catalyst, Landfall, takahē and Tarot, and in Now and Then (Landing Press).
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