Vaughan Rapatahana
Tsunami with Mushrooms by Te Āwhina Rangimarie Arahanga (Steele Roberts, 2024), 74pp, $25; endings by Bruce Bissett (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 2024), 123pp, $30; New & Collected Poems & Images by Lindsay Rabbitt (Lasavia Publishing, 2024), 211pp, $45; be the rising human by Reihana Robinson (Off the Common Books, Massachusetts, 2024), 99pp, $20
Four diverse poets, four different publishers. Yet, in their diversity lies their commonality. They are all honest publications; there’s nothing contrived about them. The same applies to their small-press publishers. Neither poets nor publishers are mainstream in the sense of having widespread readership, consistent critical acclaim, and extensive nationwide distribution—and yet several of the poets have storied careers as writers.
With one partial exception, the straightforward candidness of the publications is parallelled by clear, unadorned poems that are not striving for effect, are not overwritten. This is not to say these toikupu are ‘poor’ in any sense—far from it, particularly as each poet does create some quite brilliant imagery. David Eggleton, who edited the Bisset collection and has also delivered a blurb for the Robinson one, expresses this quality best when he describes two different quotients in the Aotearoa New Zealand reading audience, ‘Some like their poems obscure and artful, playing games with language … Others prefer their poems to be clear, transparent, obvious perhaps, but also heartfelt, and speaking a language they can recognise and endorse’. Again, this comment applies in general to all four of these poets.
Relatedly, such forthright voices often articulate discontent, even rage. These books present proletariat poems, speaking of and for the moods and views of the afflicted, the unprivileged. Oppositional political stances, and ardour about environmental destruction characterise many of the pieces across all four compilations.
Let’s look at these four poets alphabetically.
Te Āwhina Rangimarie Arahanga’s second collection is a composite of toikupu and pakipoto, as indicated in this book’s title, where Tsunami is the part title of a poem and Mushrooms the appellation of a particularly well-written short story. Indeed, it is the short prose pieces that are the forte of this kaituhi wahine Māori, ‘a rising star of Aotearoa New Zealand literature’, as described by her publisher Roger Steele.
The twenty-three poems here are easy to read; they resonate with their unpretentiousness. And they are often resplendent with chuckle-worthy asides and musings. For example, there’s:
The elephant in the zoom is an elephant
(from ‘Zoom Attenborough’)
Arahanga can also craft a clever metaphor or two, and poems such as When mountains become men and Cowboys painting mountains are extended metaphors, where the reader is occasionally gifted an exceptionally striking image, such as:
It begins when the sky has drifted
upward from the sea and kissed the dawn.
(from ‘Encore’).
Yet, ultimately, it is the frank short prose pieces that are most memorable. ‘Māori 101’ is a lovely slice of tikanga and marae kawa in the face of impending adversity, while ‘Mushrooms’ engages you directly in a straight-up way, straight out of a Māori worldview. In addition, original artwork, and vibrant photos appear across several pages, augmenting the tuhituhinga within. Tēnā koe mō tēnei paenga kōrero a Te Āwhina. Hei whakamutu he pātai. Ko wai tō iwi?
Bruce Bisset has been around as a performance poet and raconteur for quite a while, although he has not consistently been a published poet in recent years, for reasons to do with ageing and its effects on activity, as he explains in his book’s Endword. But, by crikey, he is a man of the straightforward, no-bullshit school of Aotearoa New Zealand poetry and song (for there are also several waiata included in this collection, such as ‘bruce’s blues’). Bisset has aptly titled what he calls his final collection, endings, so as to constitute the other bookend to his first collection back in 1979, titled beginnings. Call it a legacy collection, for there are many poems here to scan from a lifetime in the poetry trade—well over 80, in fact, each one given either a publication date or date of composition.
It’s a book that reveals a down-to-earth man in an increasingly reflective mode, looking back through decades at relationships, revelries, riots, regrets, and reveries. The first pieces here are from 1984, and one of these, ‘a taranaki poem’ (‘travelling the riven rock river of Taranaki’s trail/ remembering Parihaka …’), was first published in The Globe Tapes, an anthology of poems from poets who performed at Poetry Live at the Globe Hotel in Auckland. Another especially evocative poem is ‘come back’, where Bisset reminisces about his sometime crony Sam Hunt; this poem closes with the lines:
I remember it all
but know not where to begin.
And the closer this bard gets to the present moment, the more he cogitates about human frailties, and death—that miserable bastard that finally grabs and grips everyone with rigor mortis. Indeed, ‘death makes me angry’ rails the poet during a rant on this very topic in a poem ironically named ‘harmony’. Sadness permeates, sometimes creeping close to self-pity but never quite sinking into that mire of despond, given that there is a plethora of rueful ruminations throughout. And there is often a philosophical wistfulness, a wry humour—tears that never quite fall but remain ready to do so.
Bisset does craft some memorable lines at times:
if laughter is the medicine of life
then age cuts it off like a knife
(from ‘or forget’, written in 2003).
And in ‘coffee-table cut-outs’, from 2010, there’s the droll alliteration of:
… a time
of idle between idyllic
and idolatry …
And in ‘asleep in Gore, 38 years on’, written in 2021, he tells us:
words are the blood and sinew
rising up to strengthen the priapus of language …
Then there’s the entire extended metaphor of ‘antique’, from 2016, which is perhaps the quintessential Bruce Bisset, whereby the ageing poet equates himself to an old clock:
not so much ticking as palpitating
not telling time so much as marking it
At all times his mahi is performance-orientated, and as he puts it in endings’ Endword: ‘the poems should be READ ALOUD’.
David Eggleton, who selected the material for this lifetime compilation, and the Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop under the aegis of publisher Michael O’Leary, are to be commended for ensuring this comprehensive collection was published. Writing about endings alerted me to the fact that another veritable kaituhi outsider, Mike Johnson, has also penned a brief review of this Bisset set, in which he states: ‘you can feel the rhythm and cadence of a lifetime passing by with its triumphs and regrets as the world slips deeper into disaster and the years take their toll on faith and hope’. He kōrero tino mōhio tēnei. Kua tae te wā mō te whakahaumanu o Bruce Bisset.
And it is with those sage kupu from Mike Johnson that I turn to another veteran poet-publisher-photographer, namely Lindsay Rabbitt, whose most recent collection, New & Collected Poems & Images, has been borne into the world by his editor Johnson’s Lasavia Publishing. Mike Johnson, generously, has penned an erudite introduction to this substantial volume.
Rabbitt reminds me of Bisset, and Bisset reminds me of Rabbitt, and their respective collections are essentially summations of their life works as kaitito—Rabbitt has served us up well over 90 print pieces to digest. Both are gutsy advocates of what Bisset terms ‘simple is best’ and what Johnson summarises about Rabbitt as: ‘a no-frills poetic’. If anything, Rabbitt is the more minimalist of the two, as is shown graphically and emphatically by his bold letterpress entries centring the spread. I would describe him as being involved in a sort of sentient deconstruction of language and art, art and language, throughout his entire lengthy career.
Spare and pared to the bone, then, are the best kupu to describe this lifework agglomeration—and it was about time it hit the road as a polished-up book. Tēnā koutou katoa kei Lasavia. New & Collected Poems & Images consists not only of all the poet’s earlier lexical and visual compilations, or as Johnson describes it: ‘morpheme to grapheme’, but additionally contains several new, previously uncollected poems. These verge on memoirs—recollections about the past, about departed whānau, thoughts about getting old—all without any semblance of feeling sorry for oneself, all stoic and contained rather than let-it-all-hang-out. And they wax more lyrical than earlier pieces.
So, what we receive is an omnibus of all-sorts. Other than Rabbitt’s spartan verse, there are line drawings by the late Jane Pountney (Rabbitt’s wife at that time) throughout two early assemblages of the poet’s koan-like lines; there are the concrete, letterpress-inspired delvings consisting of Set Piece (1988) and Type-Cast (1995); there’s the inspirational artwork of Bodhi Vincent illuminating the much later Prayers for the Living & the Dead (2021); and there’s the multicoloured photography of Light & Shadow—all of which form a distinctive mélange from a diacritical Kiwi poet-publisher (Lindsay Rabbitt’s Voice Press was a mighty and independent literary enabler during the 1980s). The volume spans more than four decades of wondrous work. By flicking kaleidoscopically through its 211 pages, a reader encounters lines such as the following accumulation:
a kid kicks
a can of dreams
(from ‘upagainstit’)
and:
‘time produces
a perpetual white sheet’
(from ‘form, for Alan Loney’)
and:
‘take the crackle
out of your anger
(from ‘On The Line’)
Then, 36 years later, there’s this:
I go to Lorca for comfort. Alas,
all he gives me is a thrashing sea
in which I cannot drown
(from ‘All Or Nothing’)
And then there’s this:
Tinkered under the bonnets
of a couple of poems
(from ‘On My 71st Birthday’)
And, even more recently:
… I didn’t seek poverty
It found me grizzling on Renown Road
(from ‘Sleepwalker’)
Rabbitt’s typographical imprints and his variegated photographs are essential counterpoints to his written, printed material. As Martin Edmond has so aptly stated: ‘Lindsay Rabbitt’s photographs have the simplicity and the concision of his poems.’ He kaitito whakahirahira ia. Ko tēnei pukapuka te tohu.
Moving on to Reihana Robinson’s crammed-full—with over 60 poems—double-decker bus of wide-ranging toikupu. Where does one begin the journey? Robinson’s book, be the rising human, is something of a potpourri of subjects, locales and different time settings. Two distinct sections form this, her third collection, although it is a little difficult to discern quite why any given poem was selected for one of these divisions and not the other. What is manifest, however, is that there are lots of intense declamations regarding the continued desecration of our environment globally, and as such, this is a necessary call to arms. Tēnā koe mō tēnei a Reihana. Very topically, war is part of the atmosphere informing this book, and the very word ‘war’ is emphasised on several occasions.
Reihana wears her heart on her sleeve intensely throughout. At times, there is fury, too, though not always pertaining to what mankind is destructively doing to our natural surroundings. The poet also explores several other kaupapa, such as the subjugation of women and the political situations whereby injustice, indeed inhumanity, prevails. Witness some poem titles:
The earth needs songs
Does Iraq want to be part of America like Hawai’i?
The criminal rain
Children of Gaza
Robinson is by far the most outspoken poet as a voice of protest inside this arotakenga, and also something of an exception to the poets discussed earlier, in the sense that minimalism takes a dive here. Unlike the others under review, her verse gushes with lexis, perhaps pushing too hard in a sense; not because her book contains a lot of diverse poems stylistically, experimentally, and thematically, but because there are a lot of words and, except in a couple of places, few spaces. This tendency to overwrite into wordiness is not a trenchant criticism but an observation—a musing that at times less is more when it comes to writing a poem.
More significant than potential log-jams of language is the ongoing ardour about environmental evisceration and prejudicial political praxis that Coromandel-Peninsula-based Reihana Robinson consistently invokes. For, as the ubiquitous David Eggleton cogently notes in an online commentary, Robinson’s ‘poems … celebrate the earth, excoriate the new global political order, and lament for what we have lost or are losing’. Tino tika tēnei kōrero.
Undoubtedly, Robinson can certainly write, and at her best, when the words are not overplayed, she is outstanding. As in the poem ‘The way of the bear’, which strikes the perfect balance between evocative description and incisive thought: ‘If one is not looking the animal will appear/ … it is with utmost/ delicacy he places each padded foot bearing/ his slink black bulk on all fours/ He then sits, like a teddy on his hindquarters/ in the shade of a soaring spruce/ … One must not have been looking … ‘. There are dazzling lines throughout the book, of course, as well as much alliteration. Witness the following examples:
Judy is holding the past in her hand like an outdated passport
(from ‘This is the house that Jack built’)
and
Kikuyu emerging out of luggage from Kenya to the slippery
compact clay slopes of both south Pacific islands
(from ‘Kikuyu)
Indeed, why not include a complete poem, one where Robinson achieves a sublime balance of topic, technique, texture—namely ‘Homework for woman in the moon’:
I am free from housework—
no bracken to gather, no kumara to tend
no bearing creek water, no stripping harakeke
I study economics—
try to make sense of a respiring, volatile world
What have I learned?
Of all bifurcations—
men go wrong
Ka mutu pea! Tētahi atu he pātai. Why are there no illustrations in this kohikohinga? Reihana is a gifted visual artist, and it would have been great to see some of her artwork across this selection, itself published off-shore: which amounts to a further difference. Indeed, several poems have the United States as the primary subject and location.
To conclude, here we appreciate four significant talents, somewhat underrated, somewhat underexposed, and invariably forthright about inequality, avarice and injustice, as well as their own personal tribulations. This is poetry we all could do well to read deeply.
VAUGHAN RAPATAHANA (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Te Whiti) is a poet, novelist, writer and anthologist, and a critic of the agencies of English language proliferation and the consequent decimation of Indigenous tongues. He is co-editor of Te Awa o Kupu: Poetry and stories by contemporary Māori writers (Penguin New Zealand, 2023); and Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand (Massey University Press, 2024); and Te Moana o Reo Te Moana o Reo | Ocean of Languages, (The Cuba Press, 2025). His most recent book, Sexual Predation and TEFL (published by Brill, 2024), is a critique of gender-biased texts used in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL).
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