Siobhan Harvey
The Girls in the Red House are Singing by Tracey Slaughter (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024), 112pp, $30; In the shape of his hand lay a river by Iona Winter (Elixir & Star Press, 2024), 91pp, $25; The End of the Beginning by Jenna Heller (At the Bay/I Te Kokoru, 2024), 69pp, $25
Just as there are no right or wrong ways to mourn, so too there are no correct or set ways to write about mourning. Tracey Slaughter’s The Girls in the Red House are Singing, Iona Winter’s In the shape of his hand lay a river, and Jenna Heller’s The End of the Beginning illustrate diverse creative approaches to examining the universal subject of grief. More than this, though, singularly and collectively, these new books reveal the relevant and unique, vital and commonplace realities encountered by those who come up against and are therein compelled to come to terms with bereavement.
Tracey Slaughter’s distinctive voice has long set her apart as a writer. Poetic, fluid and inventive, her writing realises many of the hallmarks of Kristeva’s conceptualisation of the semiotic while simultaneously providing a realistic expose of life’s troubles and hardships. It’s a powerful and profound fusion that’s resulted in innumerable local accolades like winning the Landfall Essay Competition and the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Competition. Increasingly, it’s also drawing praise and prestige internationally. Last year alone, for instance, Slaughter took out a prestigious triumvirate: the Manchester Poetry Prize, the Australian Book Review Calibre Essay Prize and the Moth Short Story Competition. A rare feat by a rare voice. The kind of rarity, indeed, that is writ large across Slaughter’s new collection, The Girls in the Red House are Singing. This is evident in the Manchester prize-winning sequence, ‘opioid sonatas’, which opens the book:
# (allegro)
I crashed. It was choral. The glass formatted the light. She
was driving a scream into distance. The gravel doubled over. Halt
this. It was illustrated. Let the scalpel tell you what
happened. That was a trickle of mercy
from her ear. Many revolutions. Steer with the thorax. Sunlight
belts you to the ambulance. She bleeds
on the blue nurse. Asleep in needles …
The language here is so deeply layered that it simultaneously offers the detailed ‘crash’ and evocations of the implicit disruption and turmoil. Along the way, through its ‘choral’ craft elements, such as punctuation, run-on lines and symphonic repeat sounds, the work is also richly elegiac. The result is affective and displacing, the viewpoint and voice shifting the subject and reader between perspectives that are, in turn, objective (scalpel and sunlight, for instance) and subjective (the narrator).
Such complex storytelling continues through and beyond ‘opioid sonatas’. In later poems in the first section, like ‘memento mori’ and ‘lifetime prescription (for the chronic)’, for example, the death of a close friend provokes a visit to a house where everywhere and everyone is riddled and rotten in ways seemingly beyond repair:
… Or listen to the airless trickle of drainage
& try not to slip back into the vigil of my friend, the
stitchwork that leached him yellow, formaldehyde stars
projected over his gurney when morphine proved
not enough. I tried not to remember
when morphine
proved not enough. Or if I had to, I scraped words
into a notebook tooled with black leather
roses. The woman undressed to her fatty tissue
smiled down over her ancient gulf …
This utilisation of place and space to echo complex character interiority becomes a trope furthered by the next sequence section, ‘psychopathology of the small hotel’. Here, rooms in the titular figurative abode act as stage and symbol for the lives unfolding tragically within them, as the beginning of the verse, ‘reprise’ demonstrates:
You can only step into the same hotel room: the unlucky cutlery
manholed in clubfooted drawers, in aluminum couplets,
the commemorative stains on the quilt. A disputation of plastic
flowers nobody has ever dusted. Your face in
the mirror is not a complicated plot, not the epicentre
of a sonnet. I’m not asking for substitute moonlight, just don’t
let the shit-rate ambience of suite three paint my body
a shade of misfortune …
Humanity’s baseness and desperation are illuminated in means authentic and redolent to the reader. At heart, Slaughter asks her audience to undertake not just a journey of narrative but of self. The punishing difficulties the narrator confronts and frequently feels overwhelmed by are all too realistic of how big life issues like death must be brawled with by us all.
In this, creatively, Slaughter refuses the happy-ever-after conclusion too often tricked unrealistically into narrative by Hollywood. No, by the close of the final section of the book, ‘nudes, animals & ruins’ all the grief the protagonist has too frequently felt defeated by leads authentically to an uneasy stalemate, the individual and their bereavement settled into mutual solace and vexation:
… This is a dead-end I volunteered for. When I waver on the front porch
I’m expecting the flowers to feel sorry for me.
Sensitive, soulful, bruised and bruising, The Girls in the Red House are Singing is a tour de force.
In ways similar to, yet different from, Slaughter’s collection, the personal is always meaningful in Iona Winter’s fourth book, In the shape of his hand lay a river. For the personal is a parent’s journey through life in the aftermath of a child’s death. This begins with the first section, ‘Torrents’ and, therein, the initial poem, ‘Morass’:
I am the black morass of grief.
Mahuika style I drove my posts into the whenua, claimed
you to my breast, only to become ruptured.
Other people’s sequined gourds gather in womblike spaces
all swollen, organic, and complete—while my arms are
sliced with an immaculate obsidian flake.
I am te pō …
Thereafter ‘Torrents’ builds, through poems such as ‘Plastered’, ‘Stoned’ and ‘Incantations’, into the act of mourning built in equal parts from surrender and resistance, the narrator rowing with her deepest uncertainties and emotions, while steadfastly holding onto the memory and spectre of the being she birthed. ‘Incantations’, for instance, closes out the section with lines that forcefully, persuasively address the grief-stricken, the lost and the reader:
And you will know
in each crumbled moment
that you are still alive
in each sorrowful gasp
that they are safe
in each remembered glimpse
that you shared love
in each wistful reminder
that you are not alone
While the second section, ‘Subterranean’, charts traces of the life lived, the life taken, the life that took its own life, ‘Estuaries’ returns us to the one who inherits that as a memorial bulwark preventing catharsis. In the poem, ‘Heavy-limbed tree after rain’, we find the narrator addressing the silent abandonment of mourning and a debility prolonged by the smallest, deepest of memories:
You say I’m a heroine for navigating my tama’s death—
but you don’t watch me in the dark clutching his clothing
or see how my bent knees remember his spooned childhood
body, and the smell of him from milk shared willingly
I feel the enormity alone …
The concluding sections, ‘Confluence’ and ‘Tributaries’, offer possible pathways into facing down loss and survival. Like the final lines ‘faith in the endurance of nature / te taiao’:
Mother of every wave and tide
Through us, around us and over us
Mother of every birth, life and death
We praise and bless
In the shape of his hand lay a river is an essential work of poetry for the mournful and benevolent alike.
US-born, Ōtautahi author Jenna Heller’s first book, The End of the Beginning, is a creative, provocative and multifaceted voyage through the topic of leave-taking. Offered in thirty-eight flash-fiction stories structured into five sections, her work investigates and unfurls its central theme in a myriad of ways. The first segment, ‘some home any home’, for instance, is composed of nine concise tales that offset belonging with desertion, care with neglect. In the opening story, ‘Best friends’, a hedonistic, youthful acquaintance quickly putrefies into punitive, animalistic enmity. While in its follow-up, ‘Hollow’, a parental argument at home provokes a child’s escape into the wild surrounds.
Meanwhile, whereas the second part, ‘the sting in the corner’, deals with the way in which many formative experiences are interlaced by emotional and/or experiential alienation, the third section, ‘risk it all’ focuses on manifestations of identity-related awakening and estrangement.
Throughout, standouts include the hard-hitting queer-narrative, ‘She runs with the boys’, the imagistic ‘Gone’ and the ghostly ‘Stolen’. These exemplary flash-fiction tales characterise how much—message, meaning, word—the author skillfully distils into subjects that she’s simultaneously able to penetratingly mine and powerfully conclude. So that each offering sits with the reader for a long time afterwards, rippling its expression into extensive echoes of resonance.
In this, undoubtedly, the form aids Heller’s investigation, permitting intensified impact and suggestiveness. This is because, at its essence, the flash form is a medium in which concision is always paralleled by extensive intimation. Consequently, the author’s search to understand the nuances of exodus aligns perfectly with flash fiction’s own search to realise the wider force and insight conveyed in and beyond brief moments of human disruption and departure.
One of the shortest pieces in the book, ‘Mirror’, expertly conveys how the book’s dominant theme of leaving parallels flash-fiction’s inherent structural ability to suggest more than it directly conveys:
White T-shirt, sleeves turned up, loose black pants. Dancing,
twisting, and the way she moves is like a murmuring or the
swirling heat of a Nor’west wind arcing the Canterbury plains.
Short hair, sideswept. Mesmerising. Definitely queer. Tilted.
The face in the mirror. You can’t not look. Eye candy. You are
spellbound. Full of bluster and smooth confidence. You wink.
She winks. You fall into her eyes. Your eyes. Trace the jawline.
Your jawline. Caress the curves. Your curves. Pull up the T-shirt.
Your T-shirt. Unbutton the pants. Your pants. Lock eyes. Your
eyes. Breathe. Then fly solo.
The End of the Beginning is a book in which individual pieces harmonise into a collection that simultaneously and unsparingly exposes the lives on its pages while alluding to unsettling experiences, emotions and difficulties yet to unfold. The result, to borrow one of the key descriptors in ‘Mirror’, is mesmerising.
SIOBHAN HARVEY is the author of eight books, including her most recent poetry collection, Ghosts (Otago University Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in A Kind of Shelter: Whakaruru-taha: An anthology of new writing for a changed world (Massey University Press, 2023), Out Here: An anthology of LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa (Auckland University Press, 2021) and Best New Zealand Poems 2022. She teaches creative writing in Tāmaki Makaurau.
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