The Music of Thought

Michael Harlow

The Truth Garden, by Emma Neale (Otago University Press, 2012), 64 pp. $30.

Whatever else it may be — one of the ‘songs of our species’ say — if poetry is the music of thought, as it has been since its very beginnings, one of the pleasures of reading this collection has been to see and hear how the music of thought has been made into poems that, as Coleridge suggested, ‘shine a light in the ear’.

Poems that have something to say, in addition to being what they are for themselves; something about those inescapable experiences in and of life that tell, sometimes profoundly, how it is when we are mysterious to ourselves and to others, and to whatever wider world that becomes ours.

And many of these poems have a wonderful physicality about them that opens up into explorations and discoveries of intimacy, which is so vital to forging an identity beyond the narcissistic investment of self as the measure of all things. Emma Neale has the courage and the integrity to take a risk, trust her language, and make poems that matter beyond the charm of surface attention and witty elusiveness that poems of mere invention parade. The Truth Garden is in many ways a stunning book of poems; and I think more than ‘stunning’. And it’s a relief to have a poetry that asks for close reading as opposed to so much ‘glance reading’ that seems a fashionable requirement these days.

It is a book where poems of discovery go deeper and show more than poems of invention — of which we have more than enough jostling for attention. In The Truth Garden, ‘deep equals true’ as that fine philosopher-poet Herakleitos suggested.

One distinctive signature of Neale’s ‘reading’ and translating of experience is how well and with much affect she makes poems, time and again, out of what is clearly astute psychological insight.She shows us that all poetry (and art itself) begins as an act of the imagination and the reality of the imagination. And most important, she has and knows how to use an array of language skills, sometimes dazzling, sometimes quietly so apt and right for the fit-to-feeling that one takes in the reading a fine hit of heart-stopping moments. The best poetry does this, sans displays of bravado and narcissistically invested staginess.

Such psychological insight can deepen and translate what are the driving forces behind and beneath those quite ordinary and essential developmental experiences, which enables us to realise, as in her poem Event! that here is one kind of stay against the always-lurking shadow-side of life. This is a (wonderful) poem about wonder itself, and what it means to be so alive to the ordinary rhythms of life, to be so attuned to the natural world: ‘And now I see it: /the harbour glistens, a shoal of ripples flares/along its massive green hide/the scattered silver shavings…/of love pottering in a sun-spilled room./

It’s this nothing particular moment

strung from here to there

inexplicable happiness

dissolved along the blood

as if some old god

has descended in a shower of gold,

turned the body into a bead of light

run on a wire of air.

Or again, take the poem Satellite, where she’s using the frame-metaphor of the planetary universe, and writing of that archetypal and profound time as a caught moment when a child is on the cusp of separating out from (essentially the body of) the mother, making that memorial claim for an identity of self. What matters beyond the fact is that the poet understands that this is a universal experience that is always going to test our capacity for what is also the inescapable moment of a loss of innocence. And how the poet must find a language to recreate anew this moment of discovery and to bear witness to it:

Our six-year-old watches me dress

as we talk about the planets,

…

and he frowns and stares

with a mathematician’s intent

from breast to breast

as they tip into their bra cups

and I hook the straps shut;

…

he reads me fast and furious

there is something urgent

he must remember here

…

if he’s to save the World, the Good Force, himself,

before the lid of time’s capsule slides shut

and he’s shot right out of a boyhood’s orbit

the mother-ship shucked like a shell that’s shrunk

with no sound but his own breath in his ears.

The language is spare, largely unadorned, no word-popping ventriloquism, but resonant with more complex realities. And by way of further reflection, this may be the first clearly (post-)oedipal poem composed (intentionally or not) in New Zealand poetry.

So these are poems that for the most part dig below the surface of appearances to connect with perceived and felt ‘truths’ of being alive in the known and unknown world: after all, this is ‘the Truth Garden’. And which connection, under the pressure of ‘feeling first’, is going to become in the poem, and the eye and ear of the poet, a way of knowing. Understanding is one thing, knowing is another and a deeper regard. The best poems know more than they understand. This knowing is the poem, and the language is the poetry: making the invisible, visible.

As, for example, in Rootstock, in some ways a poem that is at the heart of one of the themes that weaves its way through the collection. It challenges and takes note of the messy stuff of the imagination, the shadow-side the light itself throws and depends on for any truth-to-knowing: ‘… a street in our suburb/that garners prizes: a small plaque that tells us/in the past it’s won Best Kept, …’ But then, despite the ‘one garden … that brims over its borders . . . [which] can stun me in my tracks’ there is also the awareness of ‘this attraction to the rumpled, unkempt, unshaven’, which is exemplified by the detail that: ‘among huddles of thorny weeds, and shrubs that sprout brown sticks … /someone’s dumped … an empty, blue suitcase yanked open like a scoured-out clam,/and a dozen bulging rubbish bags …’

… gratitude for the blunt statement

that sometimes things get broken, or burnt, are ugly, don’t work,

they hurt, the head and the heart overwhelmed, a tangled rat-king paradox

of sorrow, anger, loss, and who gives a toss…

…

The Truth Garden, let’s call it,

and every piece of trash slumped there

the tough rootstock of honesty.

And in the spare lyric Proposal, a very taut and somewhat chilling look — another rootstock of honesty — at the shadow-side in the light of a proposal, let’s have another baby:

and it’s like that moment

in the drink-sped conversation

at a bar in a town far from home

when the too-handsome stranger

drew out an edge of silver

like a ring to catch the light

then asking her how she liked her sex

pressed the knife’s metal tongue

to the flicker at her throat

as gently as a child were dressing her neck

with threaded stalks white petals

and it’s that moment walking past

an unlit downtown doorway

when footsteps start their time-bomb tick

behind you:

stay calm, she thinks

no sudden moves

And again in the poem Loops. A very astute awareness of and look at anxiety and its recurring effects. In this instance released from a dream:

When I tell my child

of a dream I had

where he was lost —

he’d gone alone

down to the water;

and I loosely, numbly, let too long lapse

before cold alarm set in

…

as if to say how clear the horror

of his calm, floating face would be —

And then the antiphonal response ‘in a different dream’ from the boy who is meant to calm and assuage the fears and anxieties of the mother, ‘he told me it wasn’t real, …/he was somewhere else …/that is, in a different dream:’

of another boy’s house,

dancing in costumes of moths and magicians,

eating cakes shaped like small circus marquees,

so I musn’t be sad: he was happy and safe,

at a party a long, long way from the sea.

Here is the realisation that anxiety is always about the future; and that in the end this discovery can return us — as it does for the anxious mother in the poem — to the reality of the present. It is also a more complex poem than it appears at the anecdotal level of telling. It evokes what happens when we realise and acknowledge the fact that the child caretaking the mother is a far more common experience than we might suppose — and the often (very real) deleterious consequence this can have. The poem also discovers another rootstock-truth: that in the process of claiming a solid-enough identity, we will always need to experience enough anxiety for survival, but not to be of it captivity’s captive. And, of course, it is the child’s dream created by the mother-narrator that deals with the nightmare. This is the kind of insight that lifts a poem to another level of meaningful thought, mattering beyond easy reportage and self-serving observation.

Whatever else poetry might ‘do’ that has always been so uniquely important, the best poetry wants to make everything that it touches intimate. So many of the poems in The Truth Garden do just that. They enact and show and reveal how the intimacy of thought and experience can connect and lead to discoveries – as in this from the poem Well:

        Make your two wishes, he said,
        …
        and I could have confessed each one:
        your name, and what I wanted, still want
        to have you choose to say: but then as good admit

I wished to be like water;

        able to take whatever fractures it –
        floodwrack, oar-thrust, fish leap,
        the birds’ swift javelin stabs
                     as they hurtle down and pierce the skin –
        and then as smoothly mend again,
        unmarred,
        as if the mind could be its own physician.

And what could be more intimate and more real in real-time than the experience that is a poem about death as it is a poem about life: eros and thanatos in conversation in On the death of a daughter – a lyric meditation by way of reflection on loss and grieving, here making a song of the hurt heart of sorrow, and taking consoling refuge in the natural world, which is redemptively alive and light-filled? Striking images retrieve from the dark the light that is always resident there, as in: ‘… he finds himself down at the river/[with] home-made lures/that dance as colour-drenched and flamboyant/as an opera diva’s earrings/…He goes because he has to,/

        Because sometimes a twig floats by,
        or a bird jags past
        or a dragonfly balances
        on thin air

And it’s worth quoting the remainder of the poem to catch the illumination in the music of thought that is discovered out of its own realisations:

        Yet in this still room
        we feel the river move on and on
        as if there were comfort
        or something pushing forward from its source,
        always forward,
        light gleaming on its surface instant after instant,
        each sudden vision – leaf, water-beetle, seed pod –
        a match that is struck against a deep-running dark.

    Whatever else the subject matter that seeks voice in this composition of ‘voices’ (the same voice with different pitches and tonal colours and nuanced registers), there are a number of love poems that are quite provocative for their slant on the stuff of the heart that knows more beyond the gymnastics of intellect (cf. Proposal above). Hound, a short lyric, traces through an emotionally charged conceit where

        The heart’s a bitch.
        it’s caught the scent of your coat hem,
        the tang of leather and metal on your wrists,
        the soft skin at your neck
        where the blood cursor flashes.

        You’ve gone
        leaving no clear sign –
        but still the heart strains and whines
        wants off the leash,
        snout like a cool, black magnet
        …
        as if it would track you
        bring you to the ground
        stunned but unbloodied
        the light on your face
        …

And then the lyric love poem Fall: so light-filled and animated by images of ‘light talking to light’ – the light of eros, and the light that makes intimate all that it touches – it is, I think, quite exemplary of how the music of thought can claim poetry as its song. And exemplary in showing Emma Neale not only as a fine composer but as also a fully realised conductor. There is a fine sensibility at play here. The poem reaches a fullness of expression, particularly since there is also the resonance of the poem-behind-the poem, that is to say the mythopoetic story of that other Fall:

        When it happened
        was it just that I was standing
        in the place where your light fell?

        Your random, animal love
        for the world:
        mountain, harbour,
        birch trees, song-lilt, star-shot,
        sea-sway, eyelash, gumnut,
        sunbeams aflash off roofs on the far hills
        or caught and lobbed as a window-opens

        as if my body, mind, speech, too were spun glass:
        a vessel, each, for something found equally
        in the lakes, streams, passing crowd,
        music score, spinning, scarlet leaf …

        Day fades, Love fades. The mirror drains,
        no longer throws its fiery signals,
        light talking to light,
        leaping, like a heart.

This is the kind of poetry that is always going to take risks with the subjective voice. The risks attendant on the realisation that the heart knows rightly when the head is too insistently busy with all silly else. This is a fine balance and needs scrupulous attention. She gets it tonally right and image-right time and again. There are few distractions that get in the way of hearing the authenticity of the voice. We are not reading a posture of ‘style’ here, but a voice as it were unearthing various truths through poems of discovery in The Truth Garden.

MICHAEL HARLOW lives and works in Alexandra, Central Otago. He is a poet, editor and translator, and a former poetry editor of Landfall. His most recent collections include Cassandra’s Daughter (2005) and The Tram Conductor’s Blue Cap (2009), a finalist in the National Book Awards, both published by Auckland University Press.

The Music of Thought

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