David EggletonA Long Girl Ago, by Johanna Aitchison (Victoria University Press), 2007, $25.00; Museum of Lost Days, by Raewyn Alexander (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop), 2008, $15.00; Liquefaction, by Iain Britton (Interactive Press), 2009, AUS $25.00; Self-titled, by Tony Chad (HeadworX), 2006, $24.95; How to live by the sea, by Lynn Davidson (Victoria University Press), 2009, $25.00; Overnight Downpour, by Andrew Fagan (HeadworX) 2006, $19.99; Geography for the Lost, by Kapka Kassabova (Auckland University Press), 2007, $24.99; Etymology, by Bryan Walpert (Cinnamon Press), UK £7.99.
T.S. Eliot described poetry as ‘the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings’, and words themselves as things that ‘slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision’. Good poets are not so much punch-drunk on language as wary of it, like recovering alcoholics, and however chatty or conversational the voice of the poet, it is only ever offering a persona made of language, with claims of clarity, accessibility, or indeed hermeticism, just strategic devices. Contemporary poets strain their ears to catch the silences between ‘noise’ and bring us word of them — in the form of Chinese whispers, or Russian dolls, or Zen paradoxes, or Kiwi minimalism.
Joanna Aitchison spent three years teaching in Japan, and some of her poems in A Long Girl Ago show how English-as-a-second-language speakers, tone-deaf to idiomatic subtleties, can twist and wrench her mother-tongue into a kind of karaoke, chanting odd cadences in a kind of sing-song, and thereby creating new meanings. These word-benders, with their ultra-groovy phrasemaking, gift her with pop imagery, often highly comic and colourful.
Yet Aitchison’s globetrotting instinct for the comedy and absurdity of the everyday is home-grown, as the last stanza of the first poem in her fizzy, exuberant collection reveals:
Your mother says, ‘you should brush your hair.’ You say, I’m
33.’ She runs into the house & returns, holding out a plastic
comb. She slams the car door & starts stabbing at the air,
trying to reach your hair.
(from ‘is there anybody there?’)
A related kind of slapstick, the broad brushstrokes of phrases in bright, poppy combinations, is to be found in Raewyn Alexander’s Museum of Last Days:
we tore this city up with observations
notes and nicknames fluttered in our wake . . .
However, Alexander’s stream of consciousness, discovering ‘streets lonely with parking’ and insisting on the need artists have to ‘appear from nowhere with something’, feeds off wilder emotions, and sometimes flows into whirlpools of feeling, as she becomes by turns sob sister, agony aunt, and the questioning voice in the crowd.
Andrew Fagan, too, doesn’t shy away from confrontation. This piratical singer-songwriter is capable of broadsword swipes at captains of industry on their yachts, as well as sensitive addresses to the needy: ‘Touching places/ You need to be felt/ Through the fabric of/ Your sheltered space’ — or to a lover:
We slept well
With each other
Overnight downpour
Wasn’t watching
Although I could hear it
Listening . . .
Fagan’s pieces are by turns quirky, pungent, mocking, affectionate anecdotes, spinning towards the snap, crackle and pop of the conclusion, yet they are also more than texts waiting to be imbued with the energy of performance: they sing on their own account.
Wellington singer-songwriter Tony Chad likewise offers snapshots: clipped poems, oftentimes as pithy as elegantly-penned graffiti. He wages war against hackneyed speech by paring laconic remarks back to the bare minimum, which thereby resonate and echo in the manner of a singer’s microphone reverb: ‘sick of toeing the line/ I toe/ the line/ meanwhile the line/ circles/ me/ binds me/ tighter/ &/ tighter’.
Lynn Davidson, in her collection How to live by the sea, is a coast-watcher, a shore wanderer, a philosopher: ‘We pull our longings/ and belongings in and out of empty rooms and think them full of promise. . . .’ Writing of the ebb and flow of experience, its highs and lows, she’s oceanic, her animistic perceptions refracted through prisms formed out of eyelashes and sunlight glancing off the waves:
I am fish in branches
I am nest
I am seaweed tangle
I am the pebble in the wood’s heart —
the ripples, the rings . . .
Yet if Davidson is a technician of the sacred, she is also a kind of disillusioned domestic goddess, and her understated, distinctly anti-heroic mode connects with the atmospheres and moods in the collections of both Iain Britton and Brian Walpert.
The title poem in Britton’s Liquefaction alludes to the miraculous liquefaction of a saint’s blood in Italy, and in its mode is an elliptical assemblage of rhetorical effects, so that in the end, as an old woman walks beneath the moon, ‘a flock of starlings pecks at her blackness.’ The best of Britton is about such telling perceptions: the rain ‘blowing autumns ecstasies against your windows’. His concern is with classic truths — the flight of time, seizing the moment, the island of the self: ‘You search the mirror for space and brush/ your hair. I squeeze in beside you// beside the sharp corners and wash my face/ in its silver shallows . . .’
Palmerston North-based American Bryan Walpert offers similar linguistic trapdoors and home truths — he constantly interrogates experience for lessons and parables. This ethical dimension gives his work a Catholic cast: the constant self-examination of motive and behaviour. His poem, ‘How the Ampersand became an And’, moves from hand-holding with a child to consider communion and contact, the fall from grace, the possibilities of recovery, and beyond this, is engaged in conjuring tricks with language, performing a rhetorical sleight-of-hand masterful in technique.:
Surreptitiously, nearly without notice, as dawn slips the
mooring of dark, or as all language slips its origins, years
accruing until crossing the street one morning a girl turns
seven and slips her hand from her father’s . . .
In her collection Geography for the Lost, the Bulgarian-born, New Zealand-educated, UK-domiciled Kapka Kassabova depicts something of her life as a global nomad. The book’s concluding prose memoir declares that her poems ‘bristle with metaphors of restlessness and the search for some kind of surrogate home.’ Her assorted roles of tenant, tourist, tango-dancer, make for a narrative with a force-field of magnetic intensity. This is the loneliness of the long-distance writer, of the traveller with the permanent ‘onward ticket’, for whom all ‘destinations are illusory’. There is just the keeping-on.
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