Thin Sheaves against Virtual Muses

Denys Trussell
Te Pūrere/The Exodus: The anthology of expatriate New Zealand poets edited by Vaughan Rapatahana and John Gallas (Cold Hub Press, 2025), 205pp, $35; Dancing Heart: New and selected poems 1968–2024 by Jan Kemp (Tranzlit, 2025), 172pp, n.p.

The poets in Te Pūrere are connected to Aotearoa New Zealand through residency, migration or birth, and sixty poets and 145 poems make up the book. Many are younger writers, though the anthology spans a chronology that includes writers born in the 1930s. Fleur Adcock (1934–2024) is one of the senior expatriates included. She seemed fiercely to reject living in this country, and lived for decades in Britain, where she died.

Her ‘Flight With Mountains’ is largely an elegy for a climber who died in a fall in the Southern Alps—plus an acceptance that ‘Gone is gone forever’, both in the person of the climber and in the notion of living a life in the southern hemisphere. Is this to restate the colonial Pākehā sentiment that Britain is still ‘Home’? If so, this is ironic. The generation of poets preceding her—Mason, Fairburn, Curnow, even Robin Hyde—had rejected Britain and affirmed a life in these islands.

Adcock also attacked the solace that her Pākehā contemporaries took in the beauty of the country. This is possibly from an awareness, as in her ‘Stewart Island’, that we have turned such beauty into a touristic cliché—a cliché that saves us the trouble of looking further into ourselves:

‘But look at all this beauty’
said the hotel manager’s wife
when asked how she could bear to
live there.

To leave such mindsets behind her might have been to escape provincialism, a wish she seems to share with Susan Adams, an expatriate now resident in Australia, who revolts against suffocation in her ‘Escape the Beloved Country’. Adams bemoans ‘this state of drugged control’ and declares:

Breathe me alive
brand me to struggle
make me scream with honest air
let me out.

Between the will to escape home, and homesickness, lie many other aspects of the migrant condition. Some poets simply want to be fully settled and accepted here. Racism, bureaucracy, and political and family circumstances often preoccupy those not fully ‘naturalised’. Alison Wong’s ‘Family Photographs’ tells of an intergenerational struggle to have her whānau fully accepted. In 1932 Chinese immigrants had to pay a poll tax to be allowed residence. This imposed lifestyles of long-term separation and unremitting hard work:

They will have to save.
When there is enough money
they will send for my father,
for his two elder brothers.

How long will it take?

Ecological concerns come through in poems in a variety of ways. Manisha Anjali, a writer and researcher living by turns in Fiji, Australia and New Zealand, uses myth in ways that echo Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Her ‘Sea Pilgrim’, despite drawing imagery and archetypes from a different time and place, and from a different language than Coleridge’s English, describes a bond that involves land, sea and life forms in redemptive terms. She presents an intuition of an environment in crisis, and of music as being part of the healing. Her idiom is that of intoned prose poetry:

In the present day, the fragment of music in the sea is represented by a white dolphin,
who is an incarnation of Krishna and Jesus Christ. They are the last living dolphin. All the sea animals are gone because we ate them.

Coleridge’s mariner killed a god-symbol before he made his cathartic discovery of love for creation’s creatures. Anjali’s pilgrims do not need such a killing. They already know animist love. The poet can therefore allow the orphic power of music to flow, without the shock of violence weakening the mauri and rhythm of the sea:

Wandering pilgrims will dream of music in the form of a white dolphin. Music of wish, music of anguish, music of ecstasy, and music of dandelion flowers sound the same in the womb of the loving sea.

Orchid Tierney, a poet and scholar now living in the USA, is in dialogue with the subject of ‘My Beatrice’—representing a variant of Dante’s muse in The Divine Comedy. This Beatrice is aware of a new Hell: human invention spreading over the earth and projected into space as a militarised and commercial violation of our cosmic environment. Beatrice warns, yet she also seems to be caught up in the destructive process. Her relationship with the poet is partly protective. The poet is in shock at the news:

The invasion has begun, humans
are colonising Mars with SAMS & cameras
turned to Earth like mirrors. The canals are swelling
with saltwater & dead rovers. Curiously the signs
are ominous …
I protest this intrusion of bacteria. I pull pages
from my passport to disclaim place & ownership.

Beatrice, once a figure of love and ineffable beauty guiding a poet, now seems to offer little beyond recognition that the difference between the present and future is shock and awe. The poet sees that the future is a new form of idolatry—the worship of AI. Robotic and digital, AI represents a specific threat to the living generation of humanity’s poetic language. The poet sees:

The faultline of this time is vernacular.
Soon increments of data become another thing
To glorify.

While books represent ‘thin sheaves against virtual muses’.

Nick Twemlow, a Māori poet and film-maker, is onto a similar case. He probes the cargo-cult-like preoccupation of the aerospace industry: its belief that we are not alone. In his ‘Proxima Centauri’ he writes of signals from that star, heard by scientists, that appear to be noise generated by ourselves:

Alas, the signal is interference off-gassed

from our own technology, our bread
and circus automated now, eye
tracking mind’s eye even asleep

inside grief’s dream of itself,
endless download of nothing save
the static of data, of metrics of measure.

Other political issues concern some of the expatriates. Gary Langford’s ‘Tyranny’ keeps faith with the poetic word and believes in literature as a defence against the resurgence of fascism and far-right policies around the world. It resonates with Shelley’s argument about the power of poetry to legislate a better humanity, arguing:

My work walks through a world of despots.
Books, plays and songs have a different weaponry.
They can uplift us all, even in darkness.

Alan Loney, in Melbourne, continues with the modernist focus on the Zen, or the ‘is-ness’, of the word—its singular power to stand without needing the forward motion of traditional rhythmic structure. In ‘Caesura’:

    not iambics but the Word

In all resonance, all

Its capacity
to delight, teach, even
wound
in the fulness of its range
& the empty music of
Its sound.

Angelina Stanton, expatriate as a street poet in Melbourne, suggests we deepen our dialogue with the natural world rather than looking in from the outside, while presumptively assuming our superior technology and intelligence. Her ‘Merri Merri’ speaks of a natural world that vastly predates us and does not need us:

The music and majestic beauty
Of the birds, the water
Have nothing to do with you
They simply are.
You and your dubious ethical stance
Have no business walking past
As if you imagine yourself separate
No lean into it please
And merge our species
For you must tell the dirt
And the creek and the birds
Your name before learning theirs.

In this anthology may also be found poetry that is rooted in the personality of the poet, regardless of location. Stephen Chan has long lived in London and written a clear, deeply felt lament, ‘Love in the Time of Covid’:

I stand
and hear your farewell gasp
and look up at the sky.
Not I who will draw my will
against the stars.
Not I who imagine where you are.
But love and loss
are everywhere
and loss grows like a scar.

Tensions of ‘place’, of being ‘here’ rather than being ‘there’, persist in Te Pūrere. But they are not central. To them has been added the fact that humanity is entering a new social phase—that of global collective knowledge—regardless of place of residence. The whole of earth’s environment exists now in the Age of the Anthropocene. This we know, whether we live in the highlands of Papua New Guinea or the polar landscapes of Iceland. We also know that we are collectively threatening the earth’s natural systems, and that life is not possible without them. All places are vital, and we belong to them, not they to us.

This is an undertone in Te Pūrere. Space is made for a poetic speaking that is no longer ‘site-specific’. The whole world is ‘home’, and poetry offers many ways to define this. Teilhard de Chardin, a French mid-twentieth-century philosopher and palaeontologist, spoke of our need to form a ‘noosphere’—a global envelope of consciousness. By this he did not mean the facile and false consciousness of AI. He was speaking of a living, human consciousness, a ‘field’ of cognition that could both be analogue and a reification of the envelope that is the biosphere. Te Pūrere does contain work that touches on the noosphere concept.

· · ·

Jan Kemp’s collection, Dancing Heart: New and selected poems 1968–2024, edited and introduced by Jack Ross, very much fits the theme of expatriate poetry. A long-time resident of Germany, Kemp has spent much of her life away from the country of her birth, but she has maintained strong contacts, and was instrumental in establishing the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Sound Archive in 2004, an audio collection stored at the National Library. Born in 1949, Kemp was one of the younger poets involved in the years of ‘counter-culture’ here. These were responses to the anomalies of capitalism, conflict and colonialism, made highly visible by the Vietnam War. Radical feminism, ‘open’ poetics, a belief in a sexually liberated society, and in universal and indigenous rights resonate in the title Freed, a sporadic literary publication that became a point of focus among writers—Alan Brunton, Ian Wedde, Russell Haley, Murray Edmond, Stephen Chan, Jan Kemp and others—who were students at Auckland University.

Moving through this turbulence, Kemp developed a lyrical style—concise, sensitive and imagistic; a style that makes visible the space between objects and conveys a visual emphasis in a poem. This does not mean ideas and incident are absent. They are very much there, but they speak rather than declaim. This produces all that needs to be said in a small compass:

We’ll sink before AI
Is rife, we’ll have
known human lives,
And human love.
‘Forest Burial’

She has a self-confessed affinity with Emily Dickinson, expressed in her ‘Self Portrait’:

I remind myself of Emily Dickinson
locked in the attic of my thoughts.

I believe her empathy with Dickinson is based on more than introversion. She has a similar way of sensing a poem. I had already found, in Dickinson’s output (‘Poem 653’), lines that remind me of Kemp’s presence in her own poetry:

Of Being is a Bird
The likest to the Down
An Easy Breeze do put afloat
The general Heavens—upon—

She moves in light, sure curvatures, as if in flight, through the phrasing, the junctures, the visible appearances the words might carry into a reader’s mind. Entering life by means of poetry becomes, for her, something that has created meaning and purpose throughout a life of largely self-exile. Her decision has been to stay in Europe, but to use poems to express a sense of distance and tension, feelings of being torn between places:

I long for the sea,
for islands
even the Kea’s raw call,

but love our Berg & Burg
with its cobble-stoned wall.
Now trim & as neat

As a Hausfrau should be …

‘The Kiwi in Me’

Dancing Heart begins with her most recent work, written as her husband became ill and then finally died in 2025. This subset contains some of her most accomplished poems—direct in expression, minimal in means. Among them is the six-line piece that titles the whole book:

as your two heart-valves
now don’t quite close,
I’ll slip into that space
& dance with you—
so your heart will beat
steadily & surely on …

This section ends with ‘Body Halo’:

As I sat there
I could feel
his love all around me
a body halo,
warm & sweet
as his skin, hair & breath
when I hold him,
my husband
who found me,
when I wasn’t looking

The collection then swings back to her Poems 1971–1974, beginning with the set’s title piece, ‘Against the Softness of Woman’. Written into a different world more than fifty years ago, it reveals a youth that nonetheless has sufficient judgement and will not indulge the narcissism of a lover:

you were born to fit him
to be his lay, his lie
his way to run his way;
when he has pared down his spare image
don’t try to catch him
you’ll catch yourself—

This ‘collected’ gives the impression that the shorter poem is her home territory, but she does lay out more extended works. There is her quietly satiric account of a literary château and its hostess at Lavigny in Switzerland. Jane Rosenthal Ledig Rowohlt (née Scatcherd) runs a ‘fin de siècle salon’—the siècle in this case being the twentieth century. The ghosts of Thomas Mann and Marcel Proust hover. Mann’s The Magic Mountain, though, was a sanatorium, and fiction. Kemp’s is a real mountain Shangri-la, inhabited by writers lucky enough to be healthy, but not entirely free of the risks of fade-out in a culture in decline. Kemp’s title is a brilliant alteration of Proust: À la recherche de votre temps perdu—‘In search of your lost time’. But Proust had no ‘votre’ in the title of his massive novel, making it clear thereby that it involves a universal nostalgia for a vanishing civilisation. However, Jane Rosenthal’s salon is real rather than fiction, and inclusive only of her own milieu. She has her virtues, but these are diminished by flaunted privilege—a fact of which Kemp is subtly aware:

Born in England
grown up in France you thought Switzerland
the perfect place for such homeless people
as yourselves to settle. We do suit you—we whose
home is words.

By contrast, Kemp can turn her home of words to quite different account. Her ‘Street-Sleeper, Hong Kong’ shows life stripped of the slightest privilege or hope:

His limbs are sticks and twigs.
His body is the tree of life.
He is fruit and flower of a hard city.
He did not make the top branches.

In Germany she literally stumbles over its mid-twentieth-century history in the streets. ‘Stolpersteine’, or ‘Tripstones’, a poem she chose to write in English and German, tells of the plaques sunk into pavements naming the vanished of the Holocaust. She trips and learns:

We’re missing
this person. I read:

Here lived
Julius Grünebaum
b. 1892
deported
Auschwitz
Murdered 31.10.1943

Neither the tragedies of history nor nature spare the poet. This one does not flinch at setting down the bones of a human catastrophe. Nor does she withhold pathos, lamenting in ‘Great fish at Muriwai Beach’ the fate of seventy whales that stranded on the New Zealand coastline:

where looters
can’t even give the dignity
of complete burial.

What requiem did you sing,
mighty herd
what whale-talk, what music
sang in your minds
as you followed maps
forged more ancient in you
than the land you struck
instead of water?

In conclusion I would return to ‘Us’, a poem that brings her back to the self, involved in the riddle and enigma of love. We are Us, and so included in the meanings of the words:

These bodies
we lie in
return us
to our simplest selves.

Loving, can you tell
who’s who?

 

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DENYS TRUSSELL is a poet, biographer, musician and environmentalist. The author of many books, he won the 1985 PEN Best First Book Award for non-fiction with Fairburn, a book about the life of poet A.R.D. Fairburn. He lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.