Sarah Jane BarnettClose to the Bone, by Charlotte Trevella (Steele Roberts), 65pp., $19.99; Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick, by Courtney Sina Meredith (Beatnik Publishing), 68pp., $24.99.
Close to the Bone is Charlotte Trevella’s second collection of poems published by Steele Roberts. Trevella has been building a name for herself as an emerging young poet while studying medicine in Auckland. In 2008 she was selected as one of the top fifteen youth poets in the world, and in 2009 she won the New Zealand Post National Schools Poetry Awards.
The poems in Close to the Bone conjure a modern and disconcerting dystopia. The imagery is uncompromising: it is a world of pornography and murdered women, where maggots feed on the leg of a dog and dead hedgehogs decay in toxic water. The flowers in one poem ‘reek of human meat’ while the lawn tries ‘to amputate’ the poet’s foot. In these poems the ‘sky, it’s an abattoir,’ and the world is ‘a whore.’
Close to the Bone is a difficult collection to review for a number of reasons. Firstly, when reading the poems Trevella’s skill with sound and language is clear. Her images are precise and the complexity of her language creates movement and pressure that power the poems forward. This interesting and unique voice is a strength of the collection, but a lack of restraint and editing creates problems of clarity and connection. The weaker poems string too many complex images together, with the primary focus of the poem being on metaphor. There are not many literal images in these poems, which has the effect of distancing the reader. For example, a poem such as ‘The brass monkeys’ starts out with an intense and tangible image when it describes a dead woman being pulled from the river:
A man on his way to work on drizzly winter morning
sees a naked woman floating in the Avon, face-down.
Her skin’s suffused with that elfin glow of
moonlit mushrooms, and when they drag her out
she comes to pieces in their arms.
The surreal description of the woman’s skin and the suggestion of the man’s emotional state through the chilling ‘she comes to pieces in their arms’ is great writing. As a reader, I want to stay with this image and for the poem to carefully navigate what it means to find a dead body. Instead, the poem turns brutal and surreal:
At Sunday School they teach your kids to
tear their eyeballs from their skulls, and pretty soon
the rubbish bins are filling up with body parts …
Look your kids have found a monkey
with its head stuck in the sandpit.
Three blind mice traverse the table wearing
Rolexes and Ray Bans, a pinch of salt is
what you need, and when it rains it pours.
Women with ginormous tits jump out
of your computer screen. You brush your teeth
with superglue and stop your ears with gum.
Don’t forget to wash your hands;
they’re dripping pus and plasma.
The third brass monkey takes a kitchen knife
and slices off her tongue.
By the end of the poem where the ‘monkey … slices off her tongue’ I wonder if this is a literal monkey, a dream monkey, or if the monkey is a figurative symbol for the man’s reaction to seeing a dead woman? This confusion means that Trevella’s attempt to link (and comment on) religious teaching, nursery rhymes, cliché, and fashion loses its impact. The poem feels like a bad dream, and the problem with dreams is that nothing matters; nothing is at stake. What further confuses some poems is the inclusion of mythic imagery. For example, mermaids, gods, centaurs, and fairies appear in some poems (which also draw on old and middle English descriptions such as ‘gloaming thicket’ and ‘lyres’), which are difficult to reconcile with Trevella’s dystopia. For this form of surrealism to work, it must be more nuanced.
In some poems though, such as ‘Motunau,’ one of the best of the collection, Trevella has been selective and restrained in her use of figurative imagery. This means her skill with language enhances the story in the poem ‘where in ’62 / our aunty rolled her Vauxhall Victor … in the summer dusk.’ When the poem arrives at “an aerobatic / ocean, where plankton / planets glint between the / pink sands of the strata” the transition feels earned and grounded. The poem ends on the best lines of the collection (and, for me, echos the work of American poet James Galvin):
The sky, it’s an abattoir,
where cumulus cows
and cirrus sheep kneel down
and bare their throats.
The estuary’s as bright
as plasma.
Stars divide the spoils.
The second issue that makes Close to the Bone a difficult collection to review is the tone of the book. Trevella’s language can sometimes be heavy and difficult to wade through, which mimics the struggles of the society she describes. It’s an effective technique, but when nothing is simple or plain spoken, it can get a little tiring. Many of the poems offer no redemption or escape from the dystopia they describe. It’s a grim picture.
Some poems express anger or sneer at their characters, such as the poem “Generation Z,” and a lack of author reflection or a transformative element results in the tone being unkind. On the other hand, in a stunning poem such as ‘Rumpelstiltskin said,’ the poet reflects on the power (and inadequacy) she has as a poet, which allows the poem to speak to larger issues. The poem ‘The tourist,’ an unflinching and accomplished poem, also strikes the right balance and the purpose of the poet’s cynicism is clear. Many readers will enjoy the complexity, surrealism, and rich imagery of this collection, and there is a lot to enjoy in Trevella’s writing.
Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick is the debut collection by performance poet Courtney Sina Meredith, and the collection was launched at the Frankfurt book fair. Meredith has established a local and international reputation as a performer, poet, and playwright, and she is well known on the Auckland poetry circuit. Meredith has also held a writers’ residency in Berlin, and toured Indonesia for the International Poetry Festival in early 2013. The collection opens with an introduction by poet and academic Robert Sullivan who calls Meredith a ‘leader of the new generation of writers and performance artists gracing our poetry’ and ‘the brightest voice of her generation.’ While the collection is around forty five pages, so slightly shorter than the usual book of New Zealand poetry, it feels full and complete. The book itself is beautifully produced and inviting, with a red hard cover and endpaper artwork. In this era of e-books, more poetry publishers should follow Beatnik Publishing’s lead.
As the granddaughter of Samoan immigrants, Meredith’s work is part of a larger discussion about contemporary urban life with an awareness of Pacific politics. Brown Girls is an accumulation of work from the last five years, and details the experiences of her twenties in a fresh, original, and urgent voice. As publisher Sally Greer states, Brown Girls follows a ‘writer celebrating her youth,’ but also describes the discomfort and uncertainty that entails. As one poem asks of a lover: ‘Stop bringing your body round home / hiding it under my sheets.’
The origin of these poems in spoken word and performance is clear, with their chanting rhythm, lack of punctuation, and skillful focus on sound and rhyme (that reminds me of Auckland performance poet, David Mitchell). The gift of these poems is their ability to layer themes of the disparity of urban living, the poet’s blossoming sexuality, and race issues. They depict a young woman exploring what womanhood means to her as a Samoan New Zealander, but also what her experiences mean within a larger political picture. For example, in ‘Cause Fishing,’ the poet looks beyond ‘That chick in my office with the ponytail’ in ‘her church skirt’ and thinks of ‘red dirt in Uganda, red earth on skulls / the mouth is a revolver, shooting letters back home’” Likewise, from ‘7 births, 3 deaths and 1 immigrant’ the poet moves from local to international:
My nemesis appears
and the guy I held hands with last night
adds me on Facebook.
The city has become another body
a swimming pool of skin
I dive in I kiss everywhere.
Is this some cheap Star Trek remake
with four million bodies
moving at different frequencies? …
I have seen things
K Road is under water.
It’s midnight in Munich
the distance they fed us in school has become
senseless.
The influence of Meredith’s Samoan heritage permeates these poems, and she paints a picture of people suffering (but fighting) the effects of colonisation. The book is dedicated to her grandmother who helped care for her while her mother worked, and the most compelling poems are those that describe the poet’s feelings of responsibility to her family, and the conflict that creates. In ‘My Second Mother’s Fifty Summers Old’ the poet keeps her family close:
I keep your scarves hung
I hang your face at my neck
I glow in the dark eating streets
The poet also wants more than what she describes as her ‘second mother’s’ life:
My second mother’s fifty summers old and a handful
of grandsons colder.
On buried cells where she sleeps, the girls have the
same dark thighs
her daughters hid pain and their daughters are
dreamers
The poem concludes as though a battle cry:
Take me to the states, any state. Take me out of my
doubt.
Take me Vegas New York I run my talk. Seattle,
Chicago I fly my talk!
Take me L.A D.C LSD Jersey ecstasy take me. Take
me out of me.
One of the pitfalls of writing about her twenties, a time of freedom and exploration, is that some of the poems feel personally encoded and inaccessible to me as a reader. Meredith’s stream of consciousness style and lack of punctuation also makes some poems hard to read on the page, and I wonder if this book would have been better produced as a CD of spoken word. As the collection does not experiment with form—which can make it seem ‘one note’ when read on paper—I wonder if hearing the poems read by the poet would bring greater differentiation. Criticisms aside, there are strong and arresting poems in this collection. For example, ‘Free hand love chat’ and ‘A good man gives his seat up on the bus’ are a pleasure to read, and the titular poem is this young poet’s voice at its best: clear, powerful, confronting, and heartfelt.
SARAH JANE BARNETT is a poet and reviewer who lives in Wellington. Her first collection of poems A Man Runs Into A Woman, published by Hue and Cry Press in 2012, is a finalist in the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Awards.
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